Text, Phone Alerts Getting More Looks Since Virginia Tech
Donna Howell, Investor's Business Daily
April 24, 2007 – The fatal shootings of 32 people at Virginia Tech last week took place over more than two hours, prompting some people to ask if students could have been better warned early on and deaths averted.
As it turns out, the school has been planning to add a bigger emergency alert system capable of sending text messages to cell phones. It wasn't in place that Monday, but the campus did send e-mails to students and faculty, and broadcast a telephone message to campus phones, about two hours after the first shooting.
"We are — were — in the process of putting in place such a system when this event occurred," Charles Steger, the university's president, told NBC's "Meet The Press" on Sunday. The system will be added soon, he said.
The Virginia tragedy has raised interests in alert systems. But even before that, more businesses and schools have been adopting text-message and voice warning systems despite the cost and tough task of keeping contact data current.
Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., which has about 1,750 students, purchased two years' worth of an alert service from vendor MessageOne.
"I certainly feel more comfortable knowing we have it," said the school's Web manager, Casey Paquet. "Now everyone wants to know more about it: What's going on? What are our policies?"
Eckerd followed through with plans to test its emergency text-message alert system on Friday. After the Virginia shootings, hundreds more students provided their cell phone numbers in order to take part in the test, Paquet says.
Such services typically might start by sending a text message to students' cell phones. If a student doesn't respond with a return message, the service will try to contact him other ways. It might call his home phone and leave a prerecorded message, or send an e-mail. It depends on how administrators set their preferences.
Schools often adopt alert services due to worries about the weather rather than campus violence.
"We're on 188 acres of waterfront on the Gulf, which is gorgeous," Paquet said. "But this puts us in quite a position for hurricanes."
Eckerd had to notify students about campus closures four times in 2004 and 2005 due to hurricane threats. But a year ago it signed on with "business continuity" company MessageOne. It bought 40,000 voice minutes and the same amount of SMS text messaging. Other MessageOne customers include Florida International University and Cornell Medical School.
"We have seen over the last two to five years pretty widespread adoption of emergency notification systems in (businesses)," said Mike Roesenfelt, MessageOne's executive vice president. "We think the penetration of these types of systems is significantly lower in higher education than the corporate equivalent. Where we've seen pockets of acceptance is, for instance, among schools in the hurricane belt."
The University of Florida, in Gainesville, Fla., uses several ways to try to keep in touch with its vast student population.
"First and probably most far-reaching is mass e-mail," said school spokesman Steve Orlando. "We've created a one-click all-send system on our own. It goes out to all 51,000 students and 14,000 employees."
By the middle of this week, the school also aims to have in place the first phase of a "reverse 911" system it's been working on with the local sheriff's department. Such systems let authorities call or message users.
"We'll be able to reach not only landlines but also have some cell phone capability — maybe e-mail, fax and what have you," Orlando said. "In a (reverse) 911 system if you have a gunman on campus, you can send out a prerecorded message to everyone pretty quickly."
The school also has used a free service called Mobile Campus, which lets it send ad-supported general announcements.
"The entire university uses it about once a month for various reasons," Orlando said.
Mobile Campus Chief Executive George Tingo says his firm is expanding its options to give schools the ability to use the service for emergencies without ads.
SunGard Availability Services, which provides services such as off-site servers to assure a business can continue running if an emergency occurs to its operation centers, says about 30% of its continuity customers adopt alert services — what it calls automated notifications communications software — as part of their planning. The company works with partners MessageOne and MIR3 to deliver alert services.
"The rate of adoption has grown dramatically," said Ann Pickren, SunGard's senior vice president of software. She says companies in the fields of financial services, tech, telecom, manufacturing and health care have been most aggressive in adopting the service.
"Educational institutions, I'd guess, would represent probably 5% or less of our base," she said.
