Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Mass Communication Technology
7 Best Practices for Emergency Notification
8/1/2007
A DEADLY TORNADO strike
at the University of Maryland
pushed administrators to
layer a weather
risk-management
and monitoring system with
a comprehensive siren system.
Now, when there's a problem, the sirens' blast warns campus community members to move quickly and seek shelter. But, once they've found shelter, says Gruber, people want additional details about the emergency.
Until recently, that meant using the university website, the campus cable channel, and the FM and AM stations to disseminate information quickly. "The poor woman who does the university's home page and carries her laptop wherever she goes, is called 40 times a year," he says. "She hears, ‘This is an emergency. How long will it take you to get the information up?'" Then, his team of 10 dispatchers has five minutes to notify all the campus user groups through his office's 800 MHz radio system and the facility management work control center, which then alerts emergency center people through pagers, cell phones, and other devices. "If it's during business hours, we'll also send e-mails to deans, directors, and department heads," he says. "If we try to do a mega-mailing to everybody, it takes 40 minutes to generate; too long for an emergency."
So Gruber began researching emergency solutions that could notify the community, on campus and off, in multiple formats, quickly. Although he investigated a number of vendors, Roam Secure was a slam dunk for three reasons: 1) It already was in use by other public safety groups in the geographic area (and, in fact, his department had been invited by the City of College Park, where the university is located, to go through training and setup meetings when it was deployed there); 2) the university could purchase the system up front, for a one-time fee; and 3) a "rapid enrollment" feature enables users to subscribe via their cell phones. Gruber quickly contracted for the service.
The major's advice: "Have a layered approach. Just one platform isn't going to cut it. You need to have a siren system, text messaging, and loudspeakers, too. That way, you're going to reach as many people as you can." He concedes, "It's a big investment." But, "You can't let it lapse and push it off to the side. Following the tornado, I had a tremendous amount of support, but after a couple of years, people jumped off the bandwagon. After the Virginia Tech mass murder, everybody's on the bandwagon again." What does Gruber envision, going forward? "I anticipate that a year-and-a-half or two years from now, people won't be thinking about these things anymore," he says, noting that too often, concern about communication in emergency situations is cyclical: It comes and goes depending on what's happening in the world. "It's up to us to carry the torch to implement and maintain these systems."
Recommended Reading
- Get Users on Board
- Greening IT
- It's a Zinch
- Meeting up Virtually
- Online Tutorials to the Rescue
Now's the time to use online tutorials to streamline professional development and help desk management.
- Retention Rx
