College and K-12 campuses put a lot of emphasis on mobile and electronic communications for their emergency notifications, but mobile phone messaging has some significant weaknesses. Often emergency notifications sent to cell phones go unnoticed because students, faculty and staff are constantly being bombarded by low-priority emails, pages and texts.
Some individuals on campus haven’t signed up to receive text alerts or aren’t carrying their phones. In the case of an emergency, how are we reaching people on athletic fields, walking between buildings, in parking lots and common areas, or on playgrounds? What about visitors, the sight-impaired or people who don’t own mobile phones?
If we back up our text messaging with voice notification, we’re ensuring that those people who do not have access to an electronic device at that point in time are able to hear an emergency message and get to safety as quickly as possible.
This means that the intelligibility of your campus voice communication system is extremely important. If your message sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher, your mass notification investment is lost. You want to make sure you have clear messages, where every word is heard and understood.
HyperSpike is a division of Ultra Electronics that is passionate about saving lives through superior mass notification and paging solutions. We
There are a lot of voice communication options that campuses can adopt to improve their mass notification capabilities. One option is our handheld device that gives you the power of a loudspeaker in the palm of your hand. At the push of a button, you can project up to 150 yards of clear communication that can be used not only in emergencies, but in routine situations to help manage parking lanes, crowd control, tailgating festivities or other operations.
For any kind of communication, you can look to HyperSpike for a solution.
Heather Lutton is the product manager for rugged commercial products for Ultra Electronics-USSI.
