Colorado State University (Emergency Notification Systems)
Colorado State University (CSU) has experienced the increased urgency regarding emergency notification. Fortunately, a year long effort in planning for pandemic flu has positioned CSU favorably to address the subject of emergency notification.
CSU quickly ascertained that one single service or procedure would guarantee that 100% of the student and/or faculty and staff would be contacted in an emergency. Thus, we elected to identify and initially pursue the service(s) that could reach the largest number of students, in particular, and staff and faculty quickly. Realizing that ultimately other services and procedures would be added to increase the probably of effectively contacting the students, faculty and staff. We identified that Simple Messaging System or SMS/text messaging was the service that would give us the "biggest initial bang". Note that we were, as many of you also experienced, a surge of contact from emergency notification vendors.
We gradually reduced the viable candidates to less than a handful. Ultimately, we selected Rave Wireless's Rave Alert as the best choice for CSU for SMS/test messaging. Although the actually service and administrative was not much different that other offerings, price, options, administration, and greater flexibility of its "business model" prompted our selection of Rave Alert.
We are preparing to implement the service with an anticipated service activation date of 1 July. Our next step is to continue to investigate other means of delivering emergency notification to the campus. The "end game" shall be multiple modes that collectively will give us the best change of successfully contacting members of the campus community during an emergency.
Login to post comments 9312 reads