The University of Wisconsin’s new emergency text messaging service is approaching 10,000 subscribers, marking a number university officials hope to increase by thousands this school year.
WiscAlerts-Text launched late spring 2008 as an additional precautionary measure during campus emergencies. The initiative sparked after the Virginia Tech shootings in April 2007, and the number of subscribers reached 9,825 by the end of July 2008.
“For the beginning of the program, this is a very positive number,” said UW Police Department Lt. Michael Newton. “Because we launched at the end of the school year, we are pretty happy with the numbers that have come through this summer. Once school gets started, we hope we will get several thousand more to sign up.”
While UW administrators expected incoming freshmen to sign up for the program during summer orientation, UW spokesperson John Lucas said a lag in UW’s portal prevented new students from subscribing during class registration.
“We took a broad review of all sorts of operations that would relate to the Virginia Tech situation,” Lucas said. “We wanted to find one way to reach students, faculty, staff … who might not be by their computer or desk during an emergency,” Lucas said.
Newton said it is important to realize the text messaging system will only be used for a major emergency in which it is necessary to provide a notification directing subscribers to take immediate action.
“People have conceptions that we will use this all of the time,” Newton said. “It is important to know that we are limited to 160 characters on a text message, so we need to be able to put people in the right direction based on a short message. It really can only be used in an emergency.”
According to UW Associate Dean of Students Kevin Helmkamp, WiscAlerts-Text is intended to work in tandem with other UW emergency notifications like voicemail, mass e-mail or reverse 911, in which the 911 center calls residents to notify them of emergencies.
“I think it really goes back to the philosophy that we used when we were planning our early emergency communications. We did not want to rely on any single notification,” Helmkamp said. “Our plan from the beginning was always to develop multiple, different systems.”
The year-round system will undergo a test at the end of September or beginning of October to determine its effectiveness, Lucas said.
“The system is only as good as the cell phone towers that deliver the message,” Lucas said. “We are told by the vendor that there is an unlimited number of users, but we are really curious to see if there are any issues or a slow down during the test.”
According to UW Housing Director Paul Evans, nearly 10,000 subscriptions to WiscAlerts-Text is an accomplishment, but is still not sufficient.
“It seems to me that we have a ways to go,” Evans said.
