Developing the Right Alert Notification Strategy

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Developing the Right Alert Notification Strategy

6/11/2008

By Gary J. Margolis

There is little debate that mass notification is the area most influenced by the loss of life at Virginia Tech in April 2007. Not since the installation of emergency "blue light" phones on campuses has there been such a push in security technology, due to campuses being criticized for not having such tools readily available in short order.

While high technology security and safety solutions have many benefits, higher education institutions should use an array of methods to disseminate information to the campus community during urgent situations. Universities and colleges should not depend solely on high tech solutions (i.e., multi-modal communication through personal digital assistants, e-mail, voicemail, etc.), but instead strike a balance between these systems and low-tech solutions, such as flyers, loudspeakers, etc., when appropriate. In order to maintain consistent communication, there must be multiple ways to share information that meet the following criteria.

First, an urgent communication service should enable a campus to notify its entire university community via multiple channels. It should be capable of reaching students, staff, and faculty through multiple points of contact, including voice messages, e-mail, Short Message Service (SMS) communications, and more. And it is important to keep in mind the limitations of high technology solutions. For example, SMS -- a communications protocol allowing the interchange of short text messages between mobile telephone devices -- was intended as a one-to-one communication strategy, not one-to-many. This creates challenges when the technology is taxed beyond its design.

Systems must also have the capacity to deliver messages in a timely manner. The backend infrastructure that requires aggregators and other transmission support protocols must be examined to ensure that the service providers have eliminated choke points. The service provider may have done what was needed to ensure that adequate servers can send parallel messages through enough phone lines, however, none of this will matter if the university has only one pathway through which the phone company can communicate to the desired geographic area. When telephone lines are destroyed, delivery is thwarted. Having a system that can send 20,000 text messages during a critical event is only effective if it can do so in seconds, not hours. If the service provider does not have the capacity via its own hardware or service level agreements (SLAs) with contracted support, then the system could fail. An alert notification platform should be tested at least twice a year, or more, depending on the campus community's unique demographics.

Since institutions tap into affiliate records, appropriate security and redundancy should be implemented. Colleges and universities that use a third-party vendor must ensure that access to private student and employee data is limited only to authorized personnel. Some institutions will arrange for nightly, secure data file-uploads to the vendor.