In Their Own Words: 2023 Emergency Notification Survey Participants Share Their Successes

We asked the 2023 Campus Safety Emergency Notification Survey participants to tell us about the successes they’ve had with their programs. Here’s what some of them had to say.

Published: April 10, 2023Author: Robin Hattersley

Photo via Adobe, by Dmitry Kavalchuk

Here’s what some of the participants in this year’s Campus Safety Emergency Notification Survey said about the successes they’ve experience with their mass notification programs.

We use them for all lockdowns, school delays, closures, and alternate bus plans.
Students heeded the warning about a subject with a gun on campus, thereby allowing us to mitigate the threat with minimal concern for innocent bystander issues.
We are very happy with our system. It is very flexible and has proven to be fast and reliable. We use the system for all Clery Act notifications, severe weather/conditions warnings, disruptions in bus schedules, etc. We can select the various methods of communication used, depending on the severity of the circumstances. Low level issues can be sent via just email, while higher levels can add push, SMS, phone calls, sirens, computer screen takeover, etc.
Alerted staff of snow storm coming in to ensure they could spend the night if need be.
Quick messaging when needed across multiple mediums (phone, text, email, visual, audible etc.).
The majority of personnel appear to receive messages easily.
Students were picked up in a very timely manner when we called school off due to a fire alarm.
Consistently able to reach ~97% of Students, Staff and Faculty
Announcements can be heard in classrooms and outdoors.
Able to send out notices quickly.
The fire alarm system is a good alert for people in the workshop where students need to cut wood for their projects sometimes using some machines that produce a kind of fire.
We have been able to fix many issues with messages not going through to students and staff with the help of analytics reports post alert.
We have been able to make notifications of police activity in the area.
We use ours for any weather-related closures and we had freak freeze hit and we were able to get the information out via text messages and emails to all those who were not on campus. We were also able to take over all computer monitors on campus with the alert information so those who were here knew to leave.
We recently had to have three late-starts in a row due to extremely low temperatures (-20 or colder). We were able to get the word out and our shortened days worked well with not much change in overall attendance.