Students can now register to receive emergency notifications from the University on their cell phones. The new notifications, known as the e2campus system, will allow University administrators to send short text messages to registered numbers in the event of an emergency that threatens student safety.
"We're trying to increase the likelihood that there would be as few people as possible who would be without information in a critical situation," Associate Dean of Students Bill Ashby said, adding that the University had been considering more effective means of communicating with students over the past year.
"We had gotten direct feedback from students that the effectiveness of mass e-mail was definitely waning," he said.
According to Ashby, text messages create less traffic on a cellular provider's network than a phone call and thus are more likely to be delivered during an emergency.
"Text messaging is the most effective way to communicate with students," said Ara Bagdasarian, president of Omni Alert, the company responsible for the e2campus system.
Supporting his claim, Bagdasarian noted that 95 percent of college students have cell phones.
According to Ashby, the University's emergency text messages will be accompanied by e-mails as well as alerts on new flat-panel displays around Grounds. Members of Student Council have also been working to implement these flat-panel displays since last fall. Most alerts would refer to a Web site containing additional information, he added.
Although the project had been underway for a while, Ashby noted that interest in a streamlined text-message and display-screen alert system increased after the April shootings at Virginia Tech.
"[After that incident] it became clear that the work that had been done in both of those areas, when combined, really created a viable option for emergency notification," Ashby said.
Prior to the Virginia Tech shootings, Omni Alert had sold its system to 30 schools. Now, it is in place at more than 120, Bagdasarian said.
"Every day we have a new school come on board," he said.
The University has still not developed a complete list of events that would warrant an alert but have produced pre-created messages for nine broad categories of situations, Ashby said.
The alerts would generally respond to situations in which "people would need to know to either stay away from an area or be careful if they're in that area,"Pat Lampkin, vice president for student affairs, said.
According to Ashby, five offices are authorized to send alerts: the executive vice president, the provost, the vice president for student affairs, the public affairs office and the University Police Department.
Protecting phone numbers registered for the system is the University's responsibility, Ashby said. They will ensure that Omni Alert uses appropriate security measures to prevent hacking and will limit access to the system to those officials who need to issue alerts. He added that it is the University's policy that the system will only be used for "emergency notifications."
According to Ashby, the University bought a one-year license to accommodate 20,000 subscriptions to the service for $19,000. As of July 11, 5,016 students had signed up to receive emergency alerts.
-- David Moltz contributed to this article
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