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January 18, 2008, 10:48 PM ET
After Recent Problems, LSU Successfully Tests Its Emergency-Notification System
The subject line read “Test LSU Emergency Test.” When administrators at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge activated their emergency-alert system Friday for a planned drill, more than 13,500 cell phones across the campus quickly lit up with a text message, just as they were supposed to.
“This is a test of the LSU emergency text messaging system,” the message read. “No emergency exists. This is a test.”
It was a welcome success after the same system failed to work as advertised in December, when a double homicide in a campus apartment building led administrators to use the service. During that incident about half of the 8,400 people who had signed up for the emergency-alert system failed to get the message sent by administrators.
Officials for the university and for the company that runs the alert service, ClearTXT, insist that there was no technical malfunction. They say that the cause of the problem was simply a failure to communicate.
According to Brian D. Voss, chief information officer at the university, the ClearTXT system had been set up so that it required users to specify, and then reconfirm, whether they wanted to receive an alerts via text message. Many users had apparently never reconfirmed after signing up, or they had specified that they wanted to receive an e-mail message instead of a text message, though they may not have realized either fact.
The system, which was set up in the spring, had never been tested before the December incident, says Mr. Voss.
Mr. Voss says the system has been improved so that it only uses text messages, and users no longer need to reconfirm after they sign up. The university also made other improvements before Friday’s test, and they say those all paid off.
The incident also prompted many more student to sign up over the holiday break. Now 13,657 people are on the list to receive the alerts. “We anticipate that a lot of moms and dads said, Get in there and get signed up for this,” Mr. Voss says.
It took 17 minutes for the system to deliver all the text messages, which was a bit faster than officials had expected. That many messages take time to process, Mr. Voss says. All but 115 messages went through, and officials plan to examine why those weren’t delivered. In some cases it may have had something to do with the users’ calling-plan settings, Mr. Voss says.
Officials plan to start a marketing effort soon to increase participation, and they eventually hope to get about two-thirds of eligible users to opt in. —Jeffrey R. Young
Categories: Leadership
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