University Life: The SMS Cloud and Mobile Emergency Alerting
September 12th, 2007 Posted in Mobile Gateways
Responding to the Virginia Tech tragedy, many universities are actively looking to implement a campus-wide ‘emergency notification’ system. OPTiN recently spoke with Brian Buckler, Director of Network & Telecommunications Services, in the department of Network & Academic Computing Services at the University of California, Irvine, about evaluating mobile emergency alerting solutions.
“Right after the Virginia Tech tragedy, the University put together a committee to figure out what we already had in place, and what to improve,” explains Brian Bucker. “What if there was a shooter or other type of incident? How well could the campus respond?”
Today, the University of California, Irvine (UCI) campus has over 25,000 students, 1,800 faculty members and 8,600 staff. Known as a major research university, UCI is among the fastest-growing campuses in the University of California system and Orange County’s second-largest employer.
The ‘emergency notification committee’ looked at all forms of communication and the demographics of the UCI campus community: “When you start to look at emergency notification you begin to realize that the method you need may differ depending on the emergency situation, what kind of message you want to send – and whom you want to reach,” adds Buckler.
“The committee was given the immediate directive to implement an SMS-based emergency notification solution that would allow the University to send emergency text messages to the mobile devices of students, faculty, and staff. After the SMS solution is in place, the committee will begin evaluating multi-modal emergency notification solutions and services.” explains Buckler.
Navigating the SMS Cloud
Not only the message itself was a point of debate, but other issues around the “SMS Cloud” (as the mobile messaging technology is sometimes nicknamed) also had to be considered:
• No guarantee that SMS is actually delivered
• What about a power failure, or when cables are ruptured in an earthquake?
• Privacy issues
• Redundancy capabilities
• Working with a dedicated and trusted organization
“There’s is a ton of information out there on SMS but it’s often very time consuming and difficult to get to the bottom of what is really going on in the SMS cloud,” adds Buckler. “Finding the right SMS partner is vital. In addition to helping you launch a mobile emergency notification program, they should walk you through the role of a gateway, what kind of aggregator to look for (not all are equal!), and explain how to minimize the single points of failure.”
Trying out mobile messaging
Because most of the students, faculty and staff already have mobile phones, UCI soon determined that text messaging would reliably reach at least 50% of the campus community, with a word of mouth aftereffect, hopefully, reaching most of the remaining group. All that now remained was to test the idea of mobile alerting within the campus community.
“Our first large test, a distribution of more than 6,000 messages got blocked as spam by an upstream provider”, says Buckler. “The solution was to ‘white list’ our short code in the provider’s spam filter so it wouldn’t happen again.”
The committee tapped Zot, the anteater campus mascot, to help brand the mobile emergency notification process: “When you got a ZotAlert, you immediately knew that this was something serious and not just more tiresome spam,” points out Buckler.
The results from further tests sent to students as well as faculty and staff – via mobile ZotAlerts – turned out to be more reassuring. Response rates (within 10 minutes of receiving the alert) were consistently above 70%, and the number of recipients that did not get the message was under 100 (out of a total of anywhere from 1,600 to 5,000).
“Now, in addition to e-mail, voice mail, the campus website, and other communication methods, we will use mobile text messages for urgent communications to the UCI community,” summarizes Buckler. “Our next steps are to improve the reliability of ZotAlert, and to evaluate multi modal emergency communications solutions.”
Blog back:
What sorts of communication should an emergency notification be used for?
Is SMS a good way to get an emergency notification to you? Or is voice mail, or e-mail better?
Have you ever been in an emergency situation on campus? (severe weather, power outage, etc.)? How did you get your information?
In what directory would you put an emergency response number?
Email the editor at: editor
2 Responses to “University Life: The SMS Cloud and Mobile Emergency Alerting”
By ASU alumni on Sep 14, 2007
Students baffled, unaware of Tuesday’s ASU rape
Three days after an ASU freshman was awoken by a man on top of her, there is still fear when you ask students off campus about the attack.
But on campus, we are getting a whole different story. Tempe police confirm that ASU officials are putting up composite sketches of the rapist. But ABC15 failed to find a single poster.
And of the people we talked to, none knew it had even happened.
“This is the first I’m hearing about this,” says freshman Alex Phillips. “I heard some girls talking about something with a rapist but I hadn’t heard anything.” said one engineering student.
The incident occurred September 11 off campus, at Scottsdale and Curry.
At that time, ASU officials were not investigating because it was not in their jurisdiction.
But still, this deals with an ASU freshman, who may or may not stay in school, after the tragic attic.
“I figured after the Virginia Tech situation that we could have some kind of texting policy where the entire campus is texted. At ASU, that is really popular among kids and I’d like to see that go into effect,” the student said.
And it might.
ASU leaders are now taking a look at that system but nothing is in place.
Still, many found it disconcerting to know that the campus walked freely Thursday night, completely unaware that a sexual predator is on the loose.
And since many have not seen his composite, they have no idea what they are looking for.
One student texts his female friends immediately.
Why, we asked?
Because I care about them.
In the meantime, tips are pouring in and Tempe police have signed more detectives to the case.
By Jennifer on Oct 3, 2007
This should be mandatory for all schools. I do not understand why students are not being notified when terrible things happen on or near schools.