Scenario
As the CIO at her university, Emma
is expected to be the IT service provider of emergency notification, not only
towards her institution’s Clery Act compliance, but also to support the
institution’s goal of keeping its community as safe as possible. The institution is a large, public,
research university, with tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff,
so an on-premise solution seems unrealistic, given how taxing it would on the
institution’s own infrastructure to initiate notifications for such a large
constituency.
As Emma and her IT team, along
with representatives from University Police, Public Relations, Risk Management,
and General Counsel, search for the right technical solution to meet the
institution’s emergency notification requirements, it soon becomes apparent
to everyone that the technology is actually one of the easier components of
this undertaking.
With the stakes as high as they
can be, valuable lessons are learned, not only along the road towards the
technical implementation, but also in terms of defining the actual policies, procedures,
and roles surrounding this critical function.
Learning from these lessons results in a robust, optimally effective
emergency notification implementation and set of procedural best practices,
keeping the institution’s community informed of threats to public safety and
thus as out of harm’s way as possible.
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Multi-Modal vs. Single-Modal
Some of the hosted, or SaaS
(Software as a Service), emergency notification solutions focus solely on text
messaging, in the form of mobile phone text messaging, or Short Message Service
(SMS), and email. While SMS/text might
be the most reliable, scalable modality, it should not be the only one
upon which your institution relies. With
a broad range of available messaging options and notification technologies, providing
a multimodal solution dramatically increases the chance of reaching more people
sooner, not only because of the diversity of individual communication
preferences/capabilities, but also because of the greater resiliency achieved
in not relying on only one or two communication infrastructures. In addition to text, consider landline and
cellular voice, indoor and outdoor loudspeakers/sirens, digital signage, websites,
social media, and others. In addition,
all of the modes should be controllable from a single console (or as few
control points as possible) in order to reduce the time it takes to initiate a
multimodal notification.
Emergency Only vs. Casual/Other Use
No spam! And, even if people opt in to receive
non-emergency messages, “mixed messages” dilute the most important stuff.
There are plenty of other mechanisms for non-emergency announcements,
such as LISTSERVs and websites. Reserve your Emergency Notification System (ENS)
for emergencies only, so people will treat those messages as having the utmost importance.
Templates vs. On-the-Fly Wordsmithing
There
is no time for a well-thought-out, well-crafted message during an emergency, so
do that in advance and in the form of pre-approved templates for ease. You’ll
want to establish a broad collection of templates, that account not only for
all foreseeable emergency scenarios (e.g., active shooter, armed suspect, bomb
threat, earthquake, flood, hazmat, hurricane, tornado, winter weather
emergency, etc), but also for the various modalities (e.g., email, enunciated
voice, text, tweet, etc). This also
affords buy-in on the wording from all major stakeholders, from Legal to Public
Relations to Risk. Choose an ENS that supports easily-used templates.
Text-to-Speech-Enunciated vs. Recorded-Speech Notifications
Just
as wordsmithing an appropriate message from scratch is difficult during an
emergency, trying to record a calm, cohesive voice message during an emergency
can be equally challenging, and variable scenario specifics, such as location,
prevent you from recording in advance, so leverage text-to-speech enunciation,
which has come a long way. Some systems
do support a pre- or sponsor-message, which can be recorded by a voice of
authority, like “This is University Police Chief John Doe; please listen to
this important alert.” This tends to add
some credibility to the machine-generated message that follows.
Opt-out vs. Opt-in
This
is the difference between having a near-100-percent subscriber base and a
near-zero subscriber base. Default to
having everyone signed up, for all modalities, and have them opt-out where they
want. When their actions do not mimic
their intentions, your constituents are far less vulnerable having not opted out
vs. having not opted in.
Policies and Procedures vs. Just Technology
Again, the technology is the
easy (or at least easier) part. Fully
developing and documenting your emergency notification policies and procedures,
including identifying who is authorized to initiate notifications and who is
trained in the mechanics of sending them, is critically important. Well-documented communication and marketing
plans, testing procedures, and overall notification policies are critical to
ensure consistent on-boarding, a verifiably functional system, and a clear
understanding of when and how the system will be utilized.
Consistent and Explicit vs. Irregular and “War of the
Worlds” Testing
Notifiers should literally test
at the start of every shift by sending a test message to themselves, and
those messages should never mock a real emergency scenario, just in case they
somehow are distributed by accident. This regular testing ensures that notifiers
have the access and the familiarity they need to competently and swiftly
initiate a notification, and that the system, with all of its complex
integrations, continues to function as expected.
© 2013 EDUCAUSE
This work is licensed
under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
3.0 License.
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November 2013
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