College pioneers messaging service

Author: Kathryn Flagg

Administrators on the College's Emergency Planning Steering Committee made headway this summer with plans to provide automated emergency notifications to the community's students, faculty and staff in the event of a crisis. The decision to enlist MessageOne, an Austin, Texas-based specialist in emergency communications, was announced last month in a press release from company, and signals the ongoing progress the College is making in emergency-preparedness planning.

MessageOne's system, called AlertFind, allows College administrators to quickly send text or voice messages to members of the community. According to MessageOne, as long as an intended recipient has access to a landline, text messaging device, cell phone or e-mail account, messages can be delivered by administrators accessing the system from around the world.

The electronic notification system is one of the more concrete developments being made by members of the steering committee. Planning efforts, which began over a year ago, anticipate emergencies ranging from pandemic influenza to on-campus violence.

The College hopes to collect the cell phone numbers of faculty, staff and students, along with additional contact information, at the end of this month or the beginning of October, according to Associate Dean of the College and Director of Public Safety Lisa Boudah. By the time students register for Spring Term classes, BannerWeb, the College's online student information system, will prompt users for contact information.

The system will allow the College to identify and contact specific groups, ranging from select administrators to students living in a particular dorm or individuals working in a particular building. The technology also has the capability to send immediate all-campus messages.

"We expect that it will be useful not only in truly critical situations, but also for occasions like weather emergencies when we need to convey information about college operations to employees and students who may not be in their offices reading e-mail," Provost Alison Byerly wrote in an e-mail.

MessageOne, whose clients include organizations ranging from the American Red Cross and the Wilderness Society to Siemens, Macy's and Allianz, has established a strong reputation for managing communications during emergencies in the business and corporate worlds.

"As far as I know," said John Emerson, secretary of the College and co-chair of the College's Emergency Planning Steering Committee, "we are the first college to be using [MessageOne]. Middlebury got a very favorable deal and set of circumstances from them to more or less to be one of the system's pioneers in higher education."

The text messaging model, however, has already been put to use on numerous campuses, as The Boston Globe reported in the weeks following the April 16 shooting at Virginia Tech. The April massacre, in which 33 people were fatally wounded, highlighted security concerns on campuses across the country. In the age of iPods, cell phones and YouTube, administrators told The Globe, traditional media is insufficient for quickly contacting students in the face of on-campus crises.

Administrators at Middlebury came to the same conclusion last spring.

"What we learned when we were doing the research on the pandemic flu is that students don't really check their e-mail all that much, or that the phone that's in their room isn't even turned on, because they use their cell phones all the time," Vice President of Communications Mike McKenna told The Campus in April.

In addition to creating plans to inform students, faculty and staff of a threat on campus, College planners continue to draft protocol for effectively responding to crisis situations. Last spring the committee solicited and gathered reports from 24 College departments evaluating the role individual offices play in the face of an emergency. Plans are in place to update and centralize emergency protocol information on the College's Web site, and the Department of Public Safety is collecting building plans to be on hand in the case of an emergency.

Also on the horizon is a drill, slated for December, aimed at testing the College's response protocols. While planners are still designing a scenario for the drill, the simulation will test how the College interacts with the Middlebury Police Department and their own on-campus emergency response teams.

Administrators believe the planning is already paying off.

"My sense is that Middlebury is probably ahead of the curve in this area, relative at least to other colleges in the Northeast," said Emerson. "I know we're getting quite a bit of interest in our sharing of information of resources with other places."