The need for mass alerts are greater than ever

Terrorism. Severe weather. Violent crimes. Power outages. Water main breaks. Hazardous material spills. Gas leaks. All of these scenarios happen in an instant. The question is, will your school be prepared to communicate urgent news before it’s too late?

• Increase the level of safety on or off campus.
• Increase the reach of communications with your students & staff.
• Keep your campus informed in real-time.
• Comply with The Clery Act.

Many years ago, phone dialer systems were invented to notify people of important announcements. These systems were slow to send alerts, and are still slow today. The fundamental problem with reverse calling systems is that they don’t work well during periods of high phone traffic. For instance, wired and wireless phone lines were busy for hours during the terrorist attacks on September 11th. However, SMS text messages went through just fine because they have smaller bandwidth requirements.

Following the same example, web sites that posted news of the 9/11 attacks also experienced high traffic loads, thereby making the pages unavailable to many. Web site visitors simply saw the message “page operation timed out.” The massive increase in web traffic was similar to a “denial of service” attack, making the web site useless for many who needed vital information to determine his or her next steps.

In 2004, a few technologies existed to offer alternative notification services to businesses and government, such as email or desktop pop-up alerts. The problem was, that these services were difficult to install and operate. They were also fairly expensive. Those older systems required additional hardware and software purchases to make the notifications work. Plus, network upgrades. Those systems also required the assistance of IT staff within the organization to “integrate” it into existing systems. Having so many parts and processes also made these services difficult to use. Lastly, those services are only effective if the recipient is actually using that medium at the time of alert. Many potential customers were intimidated by all of these obstacles to success.

Omnilert is the only system that easily communicates time-sensitive information to multiple devices of a recipient at a fraction of the cost and effort of competing solutions. Learn more.