LEWISPORTE -
Communicating with the residents and businesses it serves is essential for the Town of Lewisporte.
Over the years they have carried our various forms of communication through mail drops, public service announcements and phoning residents individually. Town manager Perry Pond said each of these methods had mixed results and didn't really meet the need.
In working to improve their communication strategy for the people they serve, the Town of Lewisporte last week initiated a new system similar to that in use by schools in the area for notification of school closures, events, etc. They have introduced a phone out system like the School Net system that automatically calls people whose number is contained in a specific database.
The system was first utilized last week to alert residents of water system flushing that would be occurring the next day.
"A total of over 1,400 households were notified," said Mr. Pond. "There were about 100 no answers out of about 1,400 which is pretty much a success."
The phone out message system will call back a particular number up to five times if it doesn't get an answer. It will also leave messages on voicemail. Mr. Pond noted that after the calls started going out last week they did receive calls from residents wondering what the calling system was all about.
Mr. Pond noted they are still working out a few glitches in the system and if you didn't receive a call, contact the Town office to let them know. He also noted that people renting houses or apartments would need to contact the Town of be included in the database, as would anyone with an unlisted number who wanted to be included in this phone notification system. Also, anyone who would care to change their home contact number to a cell phone for instance is welcome to do so as well, but only one number will be included in the database for a particular household.
Mr. Pond said the hope is that system will become the official system for notifications from the Town of Lewisporte. While he hasn't heard of any other municipalities utilizing any similar system, he expects it is something others would pick up on and see the benefits of.
The phone out notification system will be utilized in instances such as water shut-off's, water system flushing and other municipal maintenance and occurrences. With this system they have the ability to isolate calls to be made to residents who may only be impacted on one street, or they can call every number in their database at once. It was noted that a feature such as being able to contact the community all at once would be especially beneficial in situations such as the one last year where there were concerns with chlorine products being used in water systems in the province and everyone in the community had to be notified through individual phone calls and calling people back who were not at home.
"With this system that would have taken just one call from us and everyone would have been notified," he said.
Mr. Pond can see the possibility for expanding the usage of this system to notify people of specific events taking place in the community as well.
"Our objective here is to keep people informed," Mr. Pond concluded.
.jpg)
.jpg)
