Emergency Communication
A robust emergency notification system is able to handle whatever type of situation your campus might experience. Having a wealth of functionalities to call upon means you can alert students, faculty, and staff in any scenario with speed and ease, and manage the situation with responses and reporting. The first minutes of a situation matter most. The message has to reach everyone: students in classrooms and labs, teachers and staff across buildings, and people who are off site. At private colleges and universities, and at K-12 schools and districts, small IT and safety teams often share that job. The challenge is reaching everyone at once through one system they trust.
Singlewire
InformaCast sends one alert to many kinds of devices at once, using technology the school or campus already has. The safety team or IT launches a message from a single interface. InformaCast delivers it in several ways:
- live or recorded audio to IP phones and speakers
- pop-up alerts on desktop computers and digital signage
- text messages, phone calls, email, and push notifications to mobile devices
It also works with Microsoft Teams, and it can connect to panic buttons and door access systems.
Beyond the alert itself, InformaCast includes incident management tools, such as critical incident mapping and reporting. These help safety teams coordinate a response and review it afterward.
What should an emergency notification system do?
It should reach every person, on whatever device they are near, within seconds, from one place. That takes more than a text message. It means audio over speakers and phones, alerts on computer screens and digital signs, and messages to mobile phones for people who are away from their desks or off site. It should also show the safety team who received the alert and keep a record of what was sent.
Why isn’t a text-message alert enough?
Text messages reach phones, but not everyone is looking at a phone when an alert goes out. Singlewire, which builds emergency notification software for schools, colleges, and universities, notes that text messaging alone lacks the speed and coverage these settings need. A student in a lab or a teacher mid-lesson can miss a text, but they will hear an announcement over a classroom speaker or see it on the screen in front of them.
How does emergency communication relate to the Clery Act?
The Clery Act requires colleges and universities to notify the campus community immediately once they confirm a significant emergency or dangerous situation that poses an immediate threat to students or employees. It also requires them to test their emergency response and evacuation procedures at least once a year. A notification system is how many campuses send those alerts and run those tests. The policies for confirming an emergency and deciding what to send remain the institution’s own.
