Florida Red Cross Taps MessageOne for E-Mail Emergency Plan

The American Red Cross of Central Florida has turned to e-mail service provider MessageOne as it prepares for the height of hurricane season.

It took the Red Cross several days of staff making individual telephone calls to send out alerts, which during a hurricane emergency can be lost time.

"Calling every single person is very manually intensive and difficult to track," said Mike Rosenfelt, executive vice president of MessageOne.

MessageOne, Austin, TX, offers AlertOne, an automated emergency communications system that The American Red Cross of Central Florida, Orlando, can use to contact its team of 1,500 on-call volunteers in the case of an emergency.

AlertFind is triggered by a phone call, through a Web browser or e-mail from an official at the American Red Cross of Central Florida. After this initial contact is made, AlertFind automatically sends out thousands of emergency alerts to designated recipients with instructions for how to proceed with the crisis.

"In an emergency, it can take hours and days to contact people, and we feel like clients can radically compress the time with this," said Paul D'Arcy, vice president of marketing for MessageOne. "The hours saved can impact saving lives."