Spring Break
UGA Alert needs minor adjustments
DIANA PEREZ
Issue date: 9/27/07 Section: News
Preliminary reports from a full test conducted Wednesday of UGA Alert system suggested small adjustments need to be made, officials said.
The UGA Alert system was implemented this year to call, text message or e-mail users in case of emergency at the University.
John Newton, the University's emergency operations coordinator, said 92 percent of text messages and calls were received with either a live response or voicemail.
"We also noticed that 8 percent of the numbers we have are bad. Still, if you really think about it in terms of people, I believe that we reached 97 percent of the people on our lists. Many people listed multiple forms of contact such as text messaging, e-mail, and phone numbers," Newton said.
Small changes have to be made in the system because some things didn't work as planned.
"For example, we need to do some tweaking in the e-mail that we sent out because the link in it didn't work," Newton said.
To measure the success of the system, Newton said his office requested the help of people who are part of the alert system and were on campus during the test.
"We compiled a list of times from those people and found that the text messages were the first ones to go through to them. But we also found another small problem here because we set the system to begin alerting people at 12:05 p.m., but a lot of people said they received text messages as early as 11:58 a.m. We wanted the system to go off at 12:05 so that we wouldn't disrupt classes and those in classes would answer their phones," Newton said.
Newton added, "We still haven't really had a chance to go through all the numbers yet because our office has been very busy. We've been getting a lot of feedback about the system from the community."
UGA Alert's mass notification system is made available through The NTI Group/Connect-ED.
Newton said they wanted the Wednesday test to check whether the system in Athens could handle 19,000 simultaneous phone calls.
"This system is not designed to send out 19,000 phone calls at once. A group of people are reached at different times but still within minutes of each other," he said.
The UGA Alert system was implemented this year to call, text message or e-mail users in case of emergency at the University.
John Newton, the University's emergency operations coordinator, said 92 percent of text messages and calls were received with either a live response or voicemail.
"We also noticed that 8 percent of the numbers we have are bad. Still, if you really think about it in terms of people, I believe that we reached 97 percent of the people on our lists. Many people listed multiple forms of contact such as text messaging, e-mail, and phone numbers," Newton said.
Small changes have to be made in the system because some things didn't work as planned.
"For example, we need to do some tweaking in the e-mail that we sent out because the link in it didn't work," Newton said.
To measure the success of the system, Newton said his office requested the help of people who are part of the alert system and were on campus during the test.
"We compiled a list of times from those people and found that the text messages were the first ones to go through to them. But we also found another small problem here because we set the system to begin alerting people at 12:05 p.m., but a lot of people said they received text messages as early as 11:58 a.m. We wanted the system to go off at 12:05 so that we wouldn't disrupt classes and those in classes would answer their phones," Newton said.
Newton added, "We still haven't really had a chance to go through all the numbers yet because our office has been very busy. We've been getting a lot of feedback about the system from the community."
UGA Alert's mass notification system is made available through The NTI Group/Connect-ED.
Newton said they wanted the Wednesday test to check whether the system in Athens could handle 19,000 simultaneous phone calls.
"This system is not designed to send out 19,000 phone calls at once. A group of people are reached at different times but still within minutes of each other," he said.
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susanne pittana
posted 2/21/09 @ 8:17 PM EST
great idea! has a few problems though,it contacted me in CANADA and scared me good and proper.it took a bit of detective work to find the source and i have informed them of their error. (Continued…)
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