No More Coverage Blackspots for Community Text Alert Service in Co. Monaghan

Co Monaghan has become the first county in Ireland to achieve full coverage by the Community Text Alert initiative, thanks to an innovative partnership between the community sector, An Garda Síochána and Monaghan County Council, and facilitated by Komeer. The initiative will see all 26 local text alert groups operate under the one co-ordinated service for the first time, which will greatly simplify the task for Gardai when sending alerts out to the public.

Komeer is providing Monaghan JPC with a mass communication service on a scale not possible before. By bringing all 26 individual community alert groups into the one system, Komeer has eliminated concerns on out of date data, user consent, privacy issues and data management. With its GDPR facility, Komeer will provide data support, health checks, consent requests and data management within a centralised low-cost compliant solution. This has greatly relieved the workload on the local groups, many of whom were struggling with the administrative burden of renewing the contact details and permissions on their database following the introduction of new data protection regulations in mid-2018.

Each group can continue to send messages out to their local members with members of the public living in a part of the county which does not have a community alert group now for the first time being able to receive Community Alert messages by joining the county service from Komeer.

It is projected that each time a message is sent out, the new service from Komeer will deliver 6,000 combined notifications for the Gardai whilst saving thousands which had been previously spent on SMS costs. Monaghan County Council is underwriting the cost of the service, as it is an initiative which has been developed by the Joint Policing Committee (JPC), led by the Council. One of the main areas of work for the JPC is to address the fear of crime, especially in rural areas, and it has been working with the Community Alert groups for the past four years to identify ways that the Council and Gardai can support communities in this regard. The county-wide Monaghan Community Alerts initiative grew out of the collaboration between the community groups and the JPC and is designed to support the communities in addressing rural crime.

The new system also works for An Garda Síochána, who had been experiencing difficulties with issuing texts to multiple groups, and with the SMS system in general. The simple solution designed by Komeer to enable any Garda to issue an alert has made it very easy for the Gardai to send alerts from any station, which has become very important to them with the recent centralization of the Garda communications units.

With the new service, subscribers will be able to receive communications through the app, email, SMS and the web.

A subscriber with an old-style mobile phone can opt to receive messages by SMS (standard text message). Smartphone users can opt to download the Komeer App and subscribe to the ‘Monaghan Community Alerts’ group. The advantage of the app message is that there is no 160 Character Limit. Also, Komeer’s unique features enable the subscriber to respond yes/no to the message which could, for example, help the Gardai to track the movements of a vehicle through the county. An Garda Síochána can also select individual areas to push out localized messages within a community.

The Komeer Service was initially launched in early 2018 and has seen great success in its use in Schools, Creches, GAA and Sports clubs and recently launched its added service of Komeer Payments allowing users to now issue payments.

Another feature of the Komeer app is that it can send invitations to ‘events’. When subscribers ‘accept’ an invitation, it gets automatically added to their calendar app on their smartphone, so it helps to remind them of the event when the time comes. As the service also enables users to respond ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to messages, which opens up new possibilities for messages such as ‘have you seen this van’ or tracing missing people, a fantastic addition for assisting the Gardai. In addition to a secure two-way group messaging Komeer can be used by councils and organisations to collect payments, organise activities and proactively keep citizens and user contact details up to date with full GDPR compliance functionality.

Pat Walsh, CEO, Komeer said of working with Monaghan JPC, “We are delighted to work with Monaghan County Council and the Gardai to provide an intelligent county-wide community alert service including our unique automated GDPR compliance management service. Komeer is committed to delivering innovative and cost-effective citizen engagement solutions including communications, payment collection, polling and event promotion for Councils and community organizations.”

“With Monaghan County Council covering the cost of messages, and Komeer’s innovative technology and robust GDPR processes, subscribers are guaranteed a safe, secure, trusted and FREE messaging service which will provide a crucial link between the Gardai and the community and help to make it difficult for criminals to operate in the county. And with over 8,000 pairs of eyes on the lookout all over the county, it will be a very brave thief who strays into Co. Monaghan from now on! This is a cost-effective, reliable and secure service we at Komeer feel all county councils should be looking at commissioning”, he continued.

Carol Lambe, Community Development Officer, Monaghan Co Co said of the new appointment, “From the minute we appointed Komeer to deliver this project, they have been energetic, imaginative partners on this journey with us. No county has tried to coordinate all their community alert groups into one service before, so getting this project up and running has taken a lot of problem-solving. Komeer’s development team have been more than willing to find ways to do anything we wanted the system to do for us. Nothing is ever any trouble, and it’s always delivered in double-quick time.”

“The support that Komeer has provided to us in terms of publicity material has been second to none. They worked with us to produce posters and sign-up forms which were eye-catching and which carried all the essential project information. Files were provided to us in jpg and pdf format for our own use as well as printer ready,” she continued.

The community alert groups began to promote the service to their existing subscribers in mid-February, and already there are over 1650 users registered on the database. When all existing subscribers are transferred, there will be around 5,000 users, but already there are many applications from new users who have not registered with a text alert service before, so it is expected that by the end of the summer, the number of subscribers to the new service will be over 8,000 – which is over 17% of everyone over the age of 18 in the county!

Carmel O Hare, Head of IS “The training provided by Komeer is fantastic. We have 26 text alert groups linked into this project, each with a group administrator. Komeer has provided extensive training to these Administrators; they’ve benefited from a face-to-face session with Komeer CEO himself Pat Walsh. That was followed up a week later with a webinar, and then Pat put together a User Guide in pdf for them, tailor-made for the Monaghan Text Alerts admins”.

Inspector Kenneth Coughlan of Cavan Monaghan Division said, “One of the big improvements the new system has for the Gardaí over the old text messaging system is the feedback Komeer provides on every message sent out. There were times with the old system that we might send out a text and if a group didn’t receive it, we would have no way of knowing. Now it’s all there in black and white for us. It’s also fantastic to at last be able to get messages out to people living in parts of the county which don’t yet have an active community alert or neighbourhood watch group. We’re hoping that receiving these Garda Alerts will show them how useful Community Alert can be, and encourage these areas to start groups of their own.”

“Co. Monaghan is known for its enterprising nature, and Monaghan Co Co is known for innovation. It was Monaghan JPC which initiated the Property Marking Scheme which is taking off around the country at the moment, so it doesn’t surprise me that we are already receiving enquiries from other Councils about this initiative. It’s the future for community alert; it makes sense from a GDPR perspective, from a cost perspective, from relieving the administrative burden on the local groups, but above all it allows the delivery of a better service to the public, which is what it’s all about at the end of the day”.