StormCenter Communications, Inc.
Dave Jones, CEO
Baltimore, Maryland
Our company has supported the All Hazards Consortium has several years. Being a small company, we don't have a huge staff to help us with our marketing and communications efforts with our software product and the related services.
Working with the AHC and its Multi-State Fleet Response and SISE (Sensitive Information Sharing Environment) Working Groups has engaged us with decision makers and "influencers" in industry and government at all levels in way where we were note viewed as a vendor but a partner.
It has opened the door to so many opportunities across the country in a way, as a vendor, we could have never generated on our own
It has helped us re-package our messaging and positioning of our product that we could have only learned by being on the weekly working group calls.
It has saved us an enormous amount of time and cost by not having to fly around the country, sponsoring events that I could barely afford to speak with people who we liked but could not make a decision.
It has sustained the market for us through several elections and turnover from retirements by making all the new connects to the new people for us via the outreach and important topics they address.
It has engaged us in storm response activities that has exposed our solutions to 45,000+ stakeholders around the US and Canada, something we never could have done alone.
Their workshops and events always seem to be attended by both government and industry decision makers who want to be around the AHC's "let's fix this" operational philosophy.
They have leveraged federal government partnerships and investments along with the private sector to create a new environment for trusted people, more reliable data, and vetted solutions to come together and plan, share and test solutions that they can implement in the next disasters instead of talking about it for the next several months or years.
Lastly, the AHC have been a force multiplier for its members in a way I have rarely seen. It moves at the speed of business and solves problems quickly by leveraging other people's knowledge, investments, resources and experiences in a way to benefits everyone involved.
My advice to any organization considering joining this Sustaining Partner program is to just do it.
For us, it was a more cost effective way to get our message out than flying around the country "hoping" to find the right people that could lead us to decision makers...which is what most companies do.
For the cost of roughly a couple of 2 day two conferences that we used to attend and get nothing from really, our engagement with the AHC exposed us to dozens of smaller meetings with decision makers which not only led us to new opportunities....but help us dramatically improve the way we positioned our solutions in the marketplace and become better aligned with what the decision makers wanted and why our solution was unique.