Emergency Notification
Get The Word Out
- By Wendy Chretien
- 09/02/08
With a plethora of notification programs and feature sets available, the real challenges are which system to select and deciding how to enroll your campus community.
NO ONE SHOULD BE SURPRISED that emergency notification has become a critical
component of every higher education institution's overall emergency plan. Unfortunately, incidents
across the country have galvanized campus safety officials to find more ways to notify their campus
populations. Nearly everyone is familiar with the Virginia Tech shootings, but sadly that is only one
of several similar incidents in the past few years, including a shooting at Northern Illinois University in February. Emergency notification systems can help get and keep students, faculty members, and staff
out of harm's way.
Not only is it good common sense to have a notification system in place, today it also is the law. The
federal Clery Act originally passed in 1990 and amended in 1992, 1998, and 2000 (previously known
as the Crime Awareness and Campus Security Act) includes a "timely warning" provision that requires
campuses to alert the community about crimes that pose a serious or continuing threat to safety. For
more information about the Clery Act, The Handbook for Campus Crime Reporting is available to download from the US Department of Education.
Watch the Triggers
Violent acts are not the only grounds for
sending out an emergency alert. Others
include severe weather, bomb threats,
hazardous materials spills, gas leaks,
and fires. Depending on your campus
policies, additional triggering events
might include power outages, road closures,
missing persons, flooding, traffic
accidents, train derailments, or severe
disease outbreaks. In the event of a
major snowfall, for example, your campus
roadways may be clear, but parking
lots may not have been plowed. The
commuting population would want to
know about this in advance.
Some institutions also will send messages
about events that may be less
immediately threatening but also important
to the community, such as heating
or cooling failures in buildings, food
poisoning incidents, water shortages,
and/or inmate escapes from nearby prisons.
Today, most colleges and universities
assess incidents carefully and do
not indiscriminately send out a large
number of alerts; to do so may cause
recipients to ignore them or opt out of
the notification system (the "cry wolf"
syndrome).
System Capabilities
THE MORE AVENUES OF CONTACT you can provide, the more likely individuals on campus are to get the
message. In August 2007, for instance, Wake Forest University (NC) installed a steam whistle on campus to
alert the community to consult its other campus information systems for emergency information.
The good news is that there now are
abundant options in emergency notification.
Distinguishing features among
offerings include: whether the system
is maintained in-house or outsourced;
the means used to contact campus
community members; whether alerts
can be targeted to specific groups; and
whether the emergency notification system
stands alone or is integrated with
other campus systems.
In-house vs. outsourced. Institutions
with large IT staffs are more likely to
opt for a system that resides on campus
because they have sufficient resources
to implement it and provide ongoing
support. The primary benefit of an inhouse
system is the ability to directly
link the notification system to existing
records or directory systems, though
this may require custom programming.
In-house systems typically have a "live"
link to one of those other databases so
that contact data are always as current
as the data in those systems.