Regroup, a provider of emergency notification services to schools, businesses and government agencies, is offering free service to organizations impacted by Superstorm Sandy.
Joe DiPasquale, CEO of Regroup, said that the company wanted to do its part in helping the communities affected by the storm.
"We wanted to offer this service for free to communities hit by Hurricane Sandy because, as a company, we’ve been affected. We’ve seen the effects of Hurricane Sandy, and we’ve seen the effects of many storms like this – with Irene last year where there were power outages across much of the East Coast as well," he said. "We’re offering unlimited messaging and we have already in the last week had a couple of million messages sent out by our platform by our current communities."
DiPasquale said that organizations can take advantage of the free service throughout the month of November. The Regroup solution is a web-based platform that enables users to send a message to their constituents through a variety of different mediums such as email, voicemail, text or social media all at the same time.
"Often the period after a storm or the rebuilding from a storm can be a longer more involved process. While many people may be displaced and waiting for power to come back on before they return, (using our platforms) you can communicate power outages, road closings, traffic alerts, and gas stations with or without lines," DiPasquale said. "Our platform is meant to help officials really manage a large and diverse community that needs to receive (messages) in different ways in order for them to be effective."
Based in New York City and San Francisco, Regroup, was founded in 2006 and has 25 employees. DiPasquale said he started the company when he was in business school after recognizing the changes that were happening in the way people were communicating with one another.
"At the time, it was the rise of many different ways to communicate. Whether it was texting or mobile or social media like Facebook, and the (school) administration at the time was trying to send important announcements to students via email, but students already were paying much less attention to email and there was already the advent of spam and just being over-messaged," he explained. "We’ve seen this trend continue – both with over-messaging through email and many different ways to communicate that pop-up all the time."
According to DiPasquale, the company has five distributed data centers in the U.S. and 99.99 percent uptime, so users don’t have worry about the system failing when they need it. For more information about Regroup’s free offer to Sandy victims, call 775-476-8710 or send an email to [email protected].
