National Center for Missing & Exploited Children Delivers Missing Child Posters
Posted: Friday, July 17, 2009
by Doug Olive
Ingenium Software
OPENTEXT RIGHTFAX CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) works to help prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation; help find missing children; and assist victims of child abduction and sexual exploitation, their families, and the professionals who serve them. Since 1984, it has assisted law enforcement personnel with more than 119,800 missing child cases resulting in the recovery of more than 102,200 children.
Every second counts. This is especially true in the recovery of a missing child. According to a study by the State of Washington's Office of the Attorney General, 74 percent of child abduction homicides occur within the first three hours following kidnappings. NCMEC provides several services to assist in missing children cases, including distribution of missing child posters to law enforcement personnel, news media, schools, businesses, medical centers and other recipients. Photo distribution is a mission-critical element of recovery efforts; in NCMEC cases, one in six missing children is recovered because someone viewed a child's picture and called authorities.
NCMEC sends up to thousands of posters at one time depending on the situation and location of a search area, such as a ZIP code, area code or entire state. "At first, we did everything by postal mail," said Patti Willingham, case management operations manager with NCMEC. "We put a stamp on each envelope to send each poster out." Since this method could take days to reach recipients, NCMEC switched to faxing. "But if we tried to hand-fax each poster on a fax machine the image quality would not be good and we would have to stand by the machines, type in numbers, wait for transmittal and so on," Willingham explained. NCMEC next worked with an outsourced fax provider to broadcast faxes. However, as one of numerous clients, NCMEC files often had to wait while other transmissions we're completed, or-if notice of distribution came after business hours-posters had to wait until 8 a.m. the following day for distribution. In addition, NCMEC employees lacked convenient and timely control of recipient databases
The Solution
NCMEC now distributes missing child posters faster using the ADAM system, a service of ChoicePoint that uses Captaris RightFax. ChoicePoint, headquartered outside of Atlanta, Ga., helps businesses, government agencies and nonprofit organizations make better decisions through information and technology solutions. The public company with more than 5,500 employees has used RightFax within dozens of its business units for years and works with Ingenium Software, a solutions provider and Captaris partner in Atlanta, to maintain RightFax. http://www.ingeniumsw.com
In late 2000, ChoicePoint professionals labored nights and weekends to develop and donate ADAM, a service enabling NCMEC to electronically submit and automatically send posters to recipients using ChoicePoint's RightFax system. ADAM is named in honor of Adam Walsh, whose kidnapping and murder brought child abduction to national attention more than 20 years ago. NCMEC produces a poster featuring a picture of the missing child, saves it as a jpeg file and creates related text files. The information and a thumbnail is then loaded onto ChoicePoint's ADAM Web site and assigned target locations for distribution. ADAM examines ChoicePoint's Oracle database for all possible recipients and selects those within a designated mile radius. Using RightFax and the RightFax Oracle Integration Module that fax-enables the database, ADAM automatically transmits the data and photo of the missing child to targeted recipients without any additional human intervention. In fact, since files are loaded and delivered electronically, Willingham said the NCMEC team can now create a poster and queue it for broadcast within 10 minutes.
In 2005, the ADAM system delivered more than 1.6 million faxes. The system continues to handle high volumes of image-intensive files, totaling close to 1 million transmissions within the first six months of 2006.
On average, each fax sent during 2006 was delivered within 2.88 minutes, including time for retries. By extending the system with enhanced service and taking advantage of all 48 fax channels, ChoicePoint IT personnel predict send times may be reduced to less than one minute per fax.
"ADAM is dedicated just to us," Willingham noted. "We have control via the Web interface to send posters any time of the day or night and to add anyone to our databases when we need to." ChoicePoint recently added new fax boards to its eight RightFax Servers in order to expand its delivery capabilities. "Through this new enhancement, the ADAM program will prove to be an even more invaluable tool in allowing us to rapidly distribute photos and missing child data to targeted areas," said Ernie Allen, NCMEC president and CEO.
The Results
As of mid-2006, ChoicePoint's ADAM system powered by RightFax enabled NCMEC to assist law enforcement officers in the investigation of thousands of cases and the recovery of more than 80 missing children. For instance, in January 2006, a person visited a church asking for assistance. The next day, NCMEC used ADAM to send a missing child poster to hundreds of recipients, including the church. Two days later, the man returned again for help. Church officials recognized him from the faxed poster and called law enforcement personnel who arrested the abductor. "It's really all about time and the fact that ChoicePoint and RightFax help us get pictures out a lot faster," Willingham noted. "With other methods, no one would have had the information; we wouldn't have been able to get a poster out to that area in that quick amount of time."
Officials from ChoicePoint and Captaris expressed pride to be associated with NCMEC's work. "We're able to use RightFax resources we have for every day business to return something valuable and rewarding," said Trish McCall, ChoicePoint's corporate webmaster and ADAM program manager. "ADAM has proven to be very successful and we look forward to helping many more families in the future with this (RightFax) technology."
Dan Lucarini, senior director of marketing for Captaris, stated: "Every Captaris associate and shareholder is so proud to see our products make such a vital difference in the lives of children and their families."
For More Information
ChoicePoint is a leading provider of identification and credential verification services. It works to create a safer and more secure society through the responsible use of information while ensuring the protection of personal privacy. For more information, visit www.choicepoint.com.
Ingenium Software is a national provider of business productivity software. For more information, visit http://www.ingeniumsw.com
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Good information for everyone to be aware of, especially parents.
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