UW-Madison prepares emergency text messaging service

The University of Wisconsin–Madison is preparing an emergency text messaging service that will be able to send warnings directly to the cell phones of students, faculty and staff members in the event of a campus emergency.

The opt-in service, to be known as WiscAlerts-Text, is expected to be ready for use at the end of the semester or early summer. A team from the Division of Information Technology, the UW Police Department and University Communications is currently working on the project’s implementation.

All students, faculty and staff, as well as many campus affiliates, will be eligible to enroll. UW–Madison will provide complete details on how to sign up when the service is ready to be launched.

WiscAlerts-Text will be used to send messages to respond to or warn of an urgent situation, particularly in cases where students are being asked to do something specific, such as avoid an area of campus, evacuate a certain building or seek shelter in place.

The service will be reserved for the highest level of emergency, and will never be used for routine information, advertisements or spam.

In order to receive alerts, participants must have a mobile device that can receive text messages and must enroll in the service with their cellular phone number. (For students, enrollment will be managed through the MyUW Portal.) The service is free, but participants will be responsible for normal short messaging service (SMS) charges from their cellular provider.

WiscAlerts-Text is powered by Inspiron Logistics, the same technology offered at the University of Minnesota.

This new service is designed to augment, not replace, the university’s existing suite of emergency communications capabilities. The system, which will be known as WiscAlerts, includes:

• Text WiscAlerts, the new service to launch in late spring or early summer;
• Email WiscAlerts, the mass email sent to campus users;
• Voice mail WiscAlerts, mass voice messages to all 10,000 users on DoIT’s voice mail system;
• Reverse 911 WiscAlerts, a new service using a Dane County system to call land line phones in a certain geographic area.

The philosophy behind WiscAlerts is to send a consistent set of messages across all platforms in an effort to reach as many members of the campus community as possible, in as short amount of time as possible.

Additional communications systems that would be used in an emergency include information posted on Facebook and sent to local media, the UW–Madison Parent Program, 1-800 information numbers, call centers and the university’s home and news Web pages.

More on UW–Madison’s emergency notification system can be found on a campus case study.