Officials say emergency text messaging system shows vast improvement

Late last month, as students headed toward their morning classes, a text message went out to thousands of their cell phones. Although the text didn't contain any big news for students-in fact, it was just a test of the university's emergency notification system-it did help assure university officials that they're efforts had not been in vain.

That's because over the last few years, Eastern has been working to perfect its text messaging system to quickly let students know if an emergency were to happen on campus. The text messaging system is the main way in which the campus community is alerted to an emergency, officials said.

In prior tests, students who were registered for the notifications reported significant delays in receiving the text messages. But last month's test showed 76 percent of the people surveyed received the text message within 30 minutes.

More than 400 students responded to the online survey. And the results, officials said, marked a big improvement from prior tests in which some messages took hours to go through the system, if they made it at all.

"As technology advances, so will our emergency response program," said Mona Isaacs, director of Information Technology. "We will continue to work to find the most efficient ways to notify people if an emergency were to occur."

After earlier problems slowed the messages, Eastern made the change to a more direct system that routes the emergency text messages directly to the cell phone provider, reducing chances of being flagged as spam and canceled before they reach their destinations.

Eastern installed the initial text-messaging system in the spring of 2007, partly in response to the Virginia Tech shootings, which drew wide attention to the problems universities had in getting out urgent information to students.

The system has since grown from just a few hundred users receiving the messages to more than 10,000 text messages sent out during the most recent test, officials said.

The increase in the amount of users receiving the messages was one of the reasons the old system experienced problems, officials said.

"The first test that was conducted went very well because only a few hundred people signed up for the messages," Isaacs said. "Once the number of users increased, so did the problem of sending the messages all at once which slowed down the time users received the messages."

Hannah Peterson, a freshman nursing major from Fort Thomas, said she thought the text messaging plan worked. "I received the text message about 15 to 30 minutes after it was released," she said. "The service seemed to work rather well."

Chase Meiman, a sophomore landscaping and horticulture major from northern Kentucky, agreed.

"My text message actually went off while I was in class which was right around the time of the test," he said.

The text messaging system is a free service for all Eastern students, faculty and staff. Officials said the more students who sign up the better.

"While there has been a big increase in students registering for the system, the hope is to eventually have all people in the university registered for the service," Isaacs said.

People can go to the EKU Direct Web page to sign up for the emergency text message service.

In addition, the university has begun incorporating another service to get its emergency warnings out in a timely manner: Twitter. If an emergency were to occur, officials said a message could be posted on Twitter and anyone subscribed to the university's Twitter feed would be notified immediately.

Students can sign up for the Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/EKUEmergency.