Campus Alerting

Universities and colleges utilize Alert Beacons throughout academic, residential, recreational, and administrative settings.  Alert Beacons offer reliable emergency communications when conventional methods of email, cell phones, and landline phones are too slow or fail due to throughput limitations.  Alert Beacons are independent of cellular and the internet (although may be activated remotely via internet if desired).

Campuses typically wall-mount Alert Beacons in prominent areas such as by building entrances and stairways.  By placing Alert Beacons in residence halls, ideally near RAs, students are alerted no matter if they're awake or sleeping.  Faculty appreciate Alert Beacons in academic areas since cell phones are disruptive when not silenced. Gallaudet University, which serves the largest campus population of deaf individuals in the world, deployed Alert Beacons throughout its campus.  Many other universities and colleges have followed Gallaudet's lead to ensure ADA accessibility at their campus.

Alert Beacons are designed to be scalable across a campus footprint, yet adaptable for any location by connecting the units to LED marquee displays and other mass notification peripheral devices.  Alert Beacons can be tied into your existing or new fire alarms system and public address speaker systems.  Desktop notifier alerting and digitial signage override software from Alertus Technologies also leverages existing infrastructure investments to complement Alert Beacons.

Placing merely one or a few Alert Beacons in each building can rapidly speed up dissemination of critical information and ensure message accuracy.  The spread of word of mouth communication is reduced from hundreds of people to only a few degrees of separation.  There are no contact databases to maintain or "opt-in" publicity campaigns, and students and staff receive localized alerts when cell phones are silenced or students are sleeping on campus.

If your campus is seeking to improve reliability and redundancy of its mass notification system, please contact us to speak with one of our experienced solutions consultants.  An estimator tool can assist in determining an appropriate number of Alert Beacons for your campus.

Testimonial: Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU installed 402 Alert Beacons in classrooms where 15 or more people can meet and residence halls near the security desks.

According to John Bennett, VCU senior vice president for finance and administration, the decision to install the wall-mounted Alert Beacons was the result of concerns regarding areas of the campus where cell-phone service is minimal and in rooms where faculty members require students to turn their cell phones off. "We had a task force that met during last school year to review the recommendations of the Virginia Tech panel, and that's when the issue of cell phones in classrooms really surfaced," Bennett said. "So, rather than trying to isolate every place where (cell-phone service) is spotty and deal with individual faculty members, we figured this was just an easier way to kill two birds with one stone."

Students might confuse the sirens on campus with a fire truck or other emergency vehicle, but the Alert Beacons indoors are distinctive. "I definitely heard it [during scheduled tests]," said student Ariel Sierra. "I knew what was going on and it would be effective in a real emergency."

Alert Beacons are supplemented by 10 outdoor sirens and 35 multimedia LCD screens on VCU's two campuses as well as personal text messaging provided by e2campus, an Alertus certified integration partner. VCU also has the capacity to deliver campus-wide emails in about a 30 minute time span (far quicker than most universities) and update it's website. VCU is in the process of upgrading their desktop alerting capabilities to further extend the Alert Beacon benefits of instantaneous speed and reliability. "All of those things are designed to work in tandem," Bennett said. "We knew very early on that we couldn't devise just one channel that was going to reach everybody, which is why we have a multi-channel system.

VCU was one of the first universities to utilize Alert Beacons in all of its classrooms and residence halls. "In terms of emergency communications, we have about as robust an emergency-communications capacity as we can imagine," Bennett said.