Editor’s Desk: Making Sense of Mass Notification
For more than a year now, most universities, and to a lesser extent their K-12 and hospital brethren, have been scrambling to adopt updated emergency alert systems. There are many solutions, best practices and vendors to choose from, and the process of whittling them down to a manageable few has proven to be overwhelming for many.
Well, dear readers, those of us at Campus Safety magazine feel your pain. We’ve always known that the subject of campus protection was a complicated one, but the topic of mass notification takes the cake! In putting this supplement together, we found it practically impossible to squeeze into 32 pages all of the tips and tricks we’ve learned as they pertain to the deployment of campus emergency alert solutions.
That said, there is a ton of valuable information packed into the following supplement that will make your selection and deployment processes easier… or at least a little less confusing. In addition, the overflow of data and comments we gathered can be found online in the new mass notification section of CampusSafetyMagazine.com. Because we will frequently update it to stay current on all of the changes in the field of emergency notification, we encourage you to visit our Web site on a regular basis for new information.
Additionally, we welcome your comments on ways we can improve the site, as well as the information it contains. If you have any deployment secrets you’d like to share, we want to hear from you.
Before you read on, however, I would be remiss if I didn’t extend some heartfelt thanks to those in our community who helped CS put this supplement together. We truly appreciate the hundreds of campus safety professionals who responded to our survey, the results of which appear in the following pages and on CampusSafetyMagazine.com. Equally important are the mass notification experts and end users we interviewed. Without their input, this supplement would not have been possible.
And to our readers: May the information that follows be helpful in your campus’ quest for the right mix of emergency alert solutions.
Robin Hattersley Gray is executive editor of Campus Safety. She can be reached at robin.gray@bobit.com.
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About the Author
Robin Hattersley, Editor-in-Chief
Robin has been covering the security and campus law enforcement industries since 1998 and is a specialist in school, university and hospital security, public safety and emergency management, as well as emerging technologies and systems integration. She joined CS in 2005 and has authored award-winning editorial on campus law enforcement and security funding, officer recruitment and retention, access control, IP video, network integration, event management, crime trends, the Clery Act, Title IX compliance, sexual assault, dating abuse, emergency communications, incident management software and more. Robin has been featured on national and local media outlets and was formerly associate editor for the trade publication Security Sales & Integration. She obtained her undergraduate degree in history from California State University, Long Beach.
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