Ouachita Baptist University Sends Notification with InformaCast

  

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While students at Ouachita Baptist University (OBU) were registering for classes on August 24, 2010, administration received information about an armed robbery suspect approaching their campus. The approximately 1,500 students were notified of the situation and a lockdown of the Arkadelphia, AR campus was accomplished through text and audio messages sent with OBU’s Emergency Notification System, supported by Singlewire’s InformaCast application.

The Vice President for Student Services at OBU activated their Emergency Notification System after a call from the local police explaining the situation. “Once [the Vice President for Student Services] understood the situation at hand, he was able to send the alert from his computer,” remarks Rob Crockett, Network Administrator at OBU.  “He was able to send an audible message with InformaCast. He was able to [send] text messages. He was able to change our webpage, and send emails to all students, faculty, and staff.”

Ouachita Baptist University currently relies on InformaCast in emergency situations only. They have pre-defined scripts that can send out pre-recorded emergency messages for events like tornadoes or a fire. “During the emergency the other day, we have a pre-recorded [message] for a possible violent situation—that’s what was sent out. We then followed it up with ad-hoc messages to tell people that they need to go indoors. And, we continued to remind people during the crisis that they need to stay indoors.”

The result was a comprehensive and efficient emergency communication to the entire campus. “It worked very successfully,” says Crockett of the Emergency Notification System. “We were able to do a complete lockdown on our whole campus within about five minutes of initiating the alert to people.”

OBU has been using Singlewire’s InformaCast mass notification and overhead IP paging solution since 2007. Like many universities, OBU started their search for a campus-wide communication system after the tragedy at Virginia Tech in April, 2007.

IT Services at OBU knew they wanted a solution that included an audible component. Crockett explained that it would be unwise to rely solely on emails or their school’s webpage for transmitting information, as not everyone is at their computers at all times. “We could send text messages, but we don’t have a way to know if it is actually going to get to the phone once it leaves our network,” said Crockett, describing another challenge facing communicating with the whole campus in an emergency. “We needed to build a layered system. We didn’t need to rely on just one aspect. We needed to rely on many aspects.”

OBU’s IT Services team also decided that their future system should be simple enough for anybody to use, but at the same time, with just a couple of clicks, notification would be sent out to a variety of endpoints.

Crockett found Singlewire’s (then Berbee) InformaCast after the Vice President for Student Services made a suggestion of his own on the campus wide communication system. “Our Vice President for Student Services asked us (IT Services) ‘Is there a way we can ring all the phones on our campus to alert people?’” At first the IT Services team thought the answer was, no. “Then I was able to find InformaCast, and started looking into it and I said ‘Yes, we can do what you are asking for,” related Crockett.

Getting messages to student housing posed another challenge, as none of the on-campus residences were equipped with IP phones. With InformaCast, “we don’t have to have a phone,” explains Crockett. “We can have zone controllers, and we can put them wherever we want to and put speakers on them. That was very appealing to us at the time, especially when we knew that the audible [method of communication] was one of the easiest ways to actually get somebody’s attention—that is what you are trying to do in an emergency: get somebody’s attention.”

After conducting extensive research, the OBU IT Services team created a custom, four-phase solution that would allow them to meet all their communication and mass notification challenges: the Ouachita Emergency Notification System. With the help of InformaCast OBU now had an emergency communication system that was simple enough for anyone to use, could ring all the phones on campus, and send messages to a variety of endpoints including speakers, text messages, and email.

In Phase I, administrators use InformaCast to send out either a pre-recorded messages to the entire campus or only a select area. They simply select the message they want to send and the areas to which to send it—all from a single screen.

 “Phase II of the [Emergency Notification System] has the ability to post updates to the web, email messages, and text messages, along with instructions on how to do an ad-hoc message from an IP phone,” explains Crockett. “Phase III is where we can send an all-clear alert. Phase IV is where we can wrap up the emergency and the web alerts are removed. We package up the logs and save them for any information that may be needed later with time stamps of what we did during the emergency.”

“This was a custom built solution with the added feature of InformaCast,” remarks Crockett. “We are very proud of the system and of our partnership with Singlewire.”

OBU also uses Singlewire’s Direct Observation and Real-Time Alerting (DORA) application, which expands the notification capabilities of InformaCast, as a part of the fire alarm system in their four newest student residences. “In those four buildings, we are able to notify the residents through the fire alarm system as there are speakers in every room and every public area…. We are able to tap into that and send whatever message we are needing to send out,” says Crockett. DORA expands the capabilities of the InformaCast paging applications by allowing them to integrate with contact closure devices.

When planning the installation of the fire alarm system for the newest student residences, Crockett had the assistance of the Singlewire Support team. Crockett started talking with a member of the Singlewire Support team two years before the construction of the new residences began. He described some of the challenges they were facing and Singlewire recommended DORA. “We planned it all out and then during the installation process, we had to get it implemented,” recalls Crockett. “I had to use the [Singlewire] Support team during that period of time, and we were able to come up with some great solutions that I feel very comfortable with.”