Page 98 - Security Today, April 2019

emergency communication
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campuslifesecurity.com | March/April 2019
Increasing Efficiency and
Accuracy of Information in
an Emergency Situation
The advantages of a custom mobile safety applications and emergency notification system
An emergency notification system (ENS) is a must- have emergency management tool for campuses across the United States. It’s exceptionally common to see an institution advertising their alert system with something to the effect of “sign up here to receive emergency alerts” where students, faculty and staff are offered a plethora of notification options.
It’s a reality for students who attend a higher education institution. Emergencies will happen, and the school must have a way to contact you when an important or emergency situation arises on campus. How you receive alerts as a student is dependent on the options the institution has purchased.
The offerings of emergency notification systems vary greatly. Whether you’re looking for mass text messages, desktop alerts, web- site activation, or another alerting mechanism, there are vendors who offer some part of the puzzle to a broader alerting capability. Some of them, like AppArmor Alert, even aggregate dozens of mechanisms in
one cloud dashboard. Regardless, the in-market options give your organization great control over how aggressively and how targeted ant to issue your campus alerts.
What’s more, some of these systems offer alerting for students, faculty and staff who are studying or working abroad. This is another important avenue for which emergency managers and campus police must be aware; less frequent but equally important use cases.
Custom Mobile Safety App
Often overlooked in these deployments of emergency notification systems is the value of a custom mobile safety “app.” Android and iOS institutionally branded safety apps provide a myriad of benefits, but sometimes the organization will fail to see the value as the stakehold- ers are less familiar with apps themselves.
Or what’s worse, some institutions may opt for “generic” or “ven- dor branded” apps that only act as a mass notification endpoint with limited or no functionality. As these kinds of apps get very few down-