Honeywell’s Instant Alert® Plus notification service has been selected by Butler University in Indianapolis to quickly provide details and direction to students, faculty and staff during emergencies.
The service allows administrators to broadcast voice or text messages to any communication device — phone, cell phone, E-mail, pager or PDA — that will help improve emergency personnel response time and connect people on and off the 290-acre campus.
“With Instant Alert Plus, students, faculty and staff will immediately receive reliable, accurate information — wherever they are,” says Courtney Tuell, director of public relations at Butler University, which has more than 4,400 undergraduate and graduate students. “Following the tragedy at Virginia Tech, and now Northern Illinois University, it was important that we look for new, faster ways to notify the campus in an emergency.”
The emergency notification service can send up to 150,000 30-second phone calls and 125,000 text messages in 15 minutes. The service also allows the university to send customized messages to specific groups, such as emergency responders or residents of a particular dormitory. The system provides real-time, Web-based reports that show who has or has not received a particular alert.
Butler University can also poll and get feedback from students, faculty and staff with the service’s two-way communication function. Other features include the ability to automatically bridge message recipients into a conference call, and send attachments with text-based messages to provide more detailed information and instructions.
“In today’s mobile society, organizations are realizing emergency notification is not a one-size-fits-all service,” says Luca Mazzei, director of Americas marketing at Honeywell Building Solutions. “It’s impossible to predict where people are or the best way to reach them, so Instant Alert Plus offers the features and flexibility that Butler University and other schools need to communicate with their students and staff.”
