Ambrose unveils new alert system
Tara Wellman
Issue date: 12/4/08 Section: News
With emergency situations occurring on college campuses all across the country, there is a push for better ways to keep college communities informed and alerted to things happening on campus. Remembering the traumatic events that unfolded at Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois University, students and faculty alike have a vested interest in finding simple and effective methods to communicate emergency situations quickly.
At SAU, that communication is expanding this year with the use of the Emergency Alert messaging service.
"We, like many campuses, have been looking at how we deal with crisis and emergencies," SAU Director of Security Bob Christopher said. "One of the elements of that plan has to be how we communicate with our people, whether that's faculty, staff, [or] students. There has to be a way to communicate and we've seen that in a number of situations at other colleges."
This service allows students, faculty, staff, and even parents to sign up to receive text and voicemail alerts when there is a situation on campus.
"We partnered this summer with a company called e2campus to be able to deliver a product where students, faculty and staff would be able to go online and sign up and in the case of an emergency we'd be able to contact them through voicemail and text message," Christopher said.
Roughly 400 college campuses use the service e2campus provides. The process is undeniably simple - just go to www.sau.edu/alerts, type in the information, select the appropriate group for residential or commuter students and in seconds a validation code will be sent to your phone. Type in the code and the sign up is complete. If the school needs to get out a message, it will be sent to all the registered phones.
"The policy we've written right now
indicates that if we have reason to believe that we need to get in touch with our community to take immediate action to protect themselves or in the case of having to take immediate action because something at the school has changed like we've closed, then we'd use this," Christopher said. "In this system we'd be able to send out both text and voicemail messages and even emails."
At SAU, that communication is expanding this year with the use of the Emergency Alert messaging service.
"We, like many campuses, have been looking at how we deal with crisis and emergencies," SAU Director of Security Bob Christopher said. "One of the elements of that plan has to be how we communicate with our people, whether that's faculty, staff, [or] students. There has to be a way to communicate and we've seen that in a number of situations at other colleges."
This service allows students, faculty, staff, and even parents to sign up to receive text and voicemail alerts when there is a situation on campus.
"We partnered this summer with a company called e2campus to be able to deliver a product where students, faculty and staff would be able to go online and sign up and in the case of an emergency we'd be able to contact them through voicemail and text message," Christopher said.
Roughly 400 college campuses use the service e2campus provides. The process is undeniably simple - just go to www.sau.edu/alerts, type in the information, select the appropriate group for residential or commuter students and in seconds a validation code will be sent to your phone. Type in the code and the sign up is complete. If the school needs to get out a message, it will be sent to all the registered phones.
"The policy we've written right now
indicates that if we have reason to believe that we need to get in touch with our community to take immediate action to protect themselves or in the case of having to take immediate action because something at the school has changed like we've closed, then we'd use this," Christopher said. "In this system we'd be able to send out both text and voicemail messages and even emails."
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