The Client
Brandeis University is a leading university outside of Boston with a total student enrollment of approximately 5,600 aImage may be NSFW.
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nd about 1,500 faculty and staff members.
The Business Challenge
In the wake of the tragedy at Virginia Tech in April 2007, universities across the country were confronted with the need for improved all-campus communication. Brandeis University didn’t waste any time. Its Crisis Communications Team immediately began to seek out the best solution for the campus.
John Turner, Brandeis’ Director of Networks and Systems, remembers that parents were asking a lot of questions: “What are you doing for communication? How are you going to let our son or daughter know of a crisis? What other mechanisms do you have?”
As additional analysis of the Virginia Tech occurrence became available, reports and assessments pointed to the critical nature of a public address, or PA, system. Brandeis had recently deployed Cisco IP phones across the campus for PA messaging. This was the reason Turner and his team looked at InformaCast from day one: with its ability to broadcast emergency messages to IP phones, InformaCast was perfect for the Brandeis environment. The Crisis Communications Team realized that they could effectively implement InformaCast with minimal cost and no system disruption because they had nearly all the major components already in place.
“The surprise in the implementation of the system,” notes Turner “was the ease of doing it. We were up and running in less than four hours.”
Leveraging Singlewire’s Expertise
For the Brandeis Crisis Communications Team, two of InformaCast’s most attractive aspects were its simplicity and its immediate readiness. If Brandeis needed to send a building specific alert, they could do that with InformaCast. “We don’t have to think about any initial programming,” says Turner. “It doesn’t require us to even look inside the CallManager system. It’s something that [InformaCast] can do right out of the box.”
However, the solution could also be tailored to meet the specific needs and requirements of the Brandeis campus. “We actually had some development ideas, a few things that weren’t built into the product that we were looking to potentially leverage,” explains Turner. “For example, we were looking to create a crisis communications dashboard utilizing our LDAP directory structure on campus.” From that dashboard, Brandeis could send a single message to seven different modalities. Singlewire was not only open to working with Brandeis to accomplish this fine-tuning, they jumped at the chance to enhance the functionality of InformaCast. “It was really an enjoyable experience,” says Turner of the partnership with Singlewire. “It wasn’t, ‘Well, you bought the product. You figure it out.’ It was very much a partnership between the university and the folks at Singlewire.”
Results: A Reliable, Powerful, and Versatile Crisis Communications System
“When there’s an emergency, the Crisis Communications Teams need to be able to issue the alerts on their own,” Turner says. “Looking at the simplicity of what [InformaCast] had to offer, we knew that Image may be NSFW.
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this was a solution that could be implemented by a wide variety of [people] – from the officer on duty all the way up to senior executives at the university.”
Turner additionally notes how reassuring it has been to be able to say to students’ parents, “Look, we have seven modalities of communication…. And I think that the students are reassured too, thinking: ‘They’re going to find me somehow. There’s one of seven ways they can reach me, and I’m going to get the message.’ It definitely gives me peace of mind—that we have something in place that we can deploy when we need it.”
While Turner had experienced no doubts that InformaCast could do what Brandeis required, he observes that the speed and ease of the deployment still surprised the Crisis Communications Team. “They were like, ‘This is the right solution. There’s no muss, no fuss. We have what we need: all-campus communications – done.”
A Real Test of Brandeis’ Emergency Notification System
In May 2010, Brandeis put their emergency notification system to the test after a Boston water main break created the need to notify the entire campus with information and safety instructions quickly as possible.
“InformaCast played a key role in notifying our campus about the water main break and the need to use bottled water. I was able to quickly record a message and send it to the campus from my office at home,” says Turner. “Our students commented how effective this was in letting them know what was going on.”
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