The City of Palo Alto has launched a Community Alert and Notification System (Palo Alto CANS) and encourages the community to 'sign-up' for the system provided by Connect-CTYŽ from The NTI Group, Inc. City Staff, in collaboration with the Palo Alto Neighborhoods (PAN), local industry, and Palo Alto Neighborhood Disaster Assistance (PANDA) volunteers, have been working together to determine what the needs are for the community and how the new system might be used. Palo Alto CANS will enable the City to communicate with all residents regarding time-sensitive matters, such as unforeseen events or emergencies.
The Connect-CTY service allows city officials to send and track personalized voice messages to thousands of residents, businesses, and local officials in just minutes, through a single announcement. The service requires no additional hardware; it can be activated by City personnel from any computer with Internet access or by telephone, ensuring that officials can send vital messages from wherever they are located. The city also can track numbers that were reached with a report on the results of outgoing messages.
Examples of notifications include: disaster information, crime bulletins, power outages, and other related urgent or time-sensitive information.
The City of Palo Alto strongly urges all residents to register their contact information into the secure Connect-CTY database to make sure they are ready to receive important information from the City at all times. * NTI does not sell, lease, share, or rent personally identifiable information (names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.) to any companies or persons outside of NTI. The information will be accessed by the City of Palo Alto only for purposes of community alerts and notification.
Primary residential and business phones in Palo Alto are automatically included in the system. However, there is a chance the number is outdated or incorrect, or a resident may prefer to receive notifications through another method (email, text message, cell or a work number). Residents can opt-in to provide complete information (up to three phone numbers and two e-mail addresses) by visiting the City of Palo Alto Website (www.cityofpaloalto.org), clicking on the Emergency Information icon on the home page, and going to the link that says "SIGN UP NOW PALO ALTO CANS - SERVICES BY CONNECT-CTY" to enter their information into the secure database. For those without residential Internet access, they can access the system on computers at local libraries and city staff will be working with local neighborhoods and business to make internet computers available. Residents with call blocking services can make sure to receive the city's time-sensitive alerts by adding 650-329-2498 to their approved number list.
The Connect-CTY system can store the individual contact information as separate records, even if they have the same address. Each record will have different contact information, and in the case that there are redundant phone numbers (i.e. same home phone) the system will only call that number once. Each resident in the same household can sign up via the web portal, enter in the same address and, in some cases, the same last name. If the last name and address fields are identical, the primary phone fields will need to be different in order for the record to be accepted. Otherwise the system will see this as a duplicate record and prohibit registration of the contact.
