What's new in 911? A review of NENA 2023

Aaaaannnnndddd just like that, NENA 2023 has come and gone. Did you miss it? The Prepared team certainly did not! Team members from across the company, including Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Leadership, descended on Grapevine to connect with 9-1-1 professionals and industry leaders.

Here are three takeaways from our team from NENA 2023:

Empower the telecommunicator

There's no event that better highlights the growth of 9-1-1 technology than this conference. Hundreds of vendors demo new, cutting-edge solutions designed to power public safety. But how many of these are built with the telecommunicator in mind?

As 9-1-1 centers around the country deal with a staffing crisis, it's more important than ever to empower the telecommunicator with technology, not bog them down with another screen and a significant alteration to their workflow. By providing an interoperable solution that centralizes mission-critical, NG911 functionalities in a single screen, Prepared is doing just that.

Text proves crucial

We recently hosted a webinar that featured two 9-1-1 leaders discussing how they've leveraged the power of text in their centers. To begin with, neither Roxanne VanGundy or Kevin Lessard view text in 9-1-1 as just Text-to-911. They see the ability to send outbound "text-from-911" as crucial to their agencies because of how it unlocks a new kind of communication with the community.

When Hood County Sheriff's Department stopped by the Prepared booth, a member of their team shared a story that demonstrates this value:

• Community member called 9-1-1 but the telecommunicator heard nothing on the other end of the line
• Telecommunicator texted the caller a message that included a Prepared Live link
• The caller clicked it, indicated via live video that they could not speak, and the telecommunicator was able to then begin communication over text to get them the help they needed

Elsewhere, Rutherford County Sheriffs Department shared with our team that they recently had a successful use case with our text language translation that began with an outbound text that resulted in a back and forth in Hindi, one of the 140+ languages that Prepared Live can translate. The Hindi text instantly translated to English for the telecommunicator and the telecommunicator, typing in English that automatically translates into Hindi, texted back in Hindi to get the reporting party the help they needed.

Culture is paramount

As the aforementioned staffing crisis has spread across the country, maintaining good culture in the PSAP/ECC has become more important than ever before. Prepared is proud to work with some amazing Directors and Supervisors that do an excellent job instilling good culture in their organizations.

We are also proud to have had our newest employee, JaCorey Glaude, ENP RPL CCSM, who also works part-time as a telecommunicator, speak about culture during one of the conference's breakout sessions.

JaCorey spoke about a wide range of topics, including:

• What good culture looks like
• How each individual can better participate in and promote good culture,
• How recognizing and appreciating the diverse backgrounds of your team members helps bring about better understanding and better communication within the team

By focusing on culture, JaCorey says, ECCs/PSAPs can enhance their teams' overall performance on calls.