Thinking Outside the Mass Notification Box: Featuring Gordon College
By Maya Barak, Senior Marketing Manager at Alertus Technologies
A mass notification system (MNS) is key for emergency preparedness. In implementing a comprehensive MNS to prepare for the unpredictable, you’ve taken a crucial step in ensuring you can reach your entire organization with potentially life-saving information at the push of a button. But did you know that you don’t have to wait for a critical emergency to get the most out of your Alertus System?
Gordon College, a private institution in Wenham, Massachusetts serving approximately 1,500 undergraduate students, leverages Alertus’ solutions 24/7 to monitor and automatically alert for low-level emergency and property conservation situations. Chris Jones, Gordon’s Vice President for Administration and Emergency Management Coordinator, shares how he has used his IT background and out-of-the-box thinking to deploy the Alertus System in ways that have significantly improved monitoring, response times, and cost-savings for the college.
Name: Chris Jones
Title: Vice President for Administration and Emergency Management Coordinator
School: Gordon College
Can you tell us a little about Gordon College and your role there?
Gordon College is a highly residential, mainly undergraduate institution. Even though our main campus is in a very consolidated area, we have more than 400 acres of beautiful hiking trails, ponds, and wetlands to explore around us. I’ve worked at Gordon for 21 years, ever since I graduated as a student myself. As a computer science major, IT has always been part of my background, but I’ve also had the opportunity to work as part of an on-call fire department for the last 18 years (I’m now a call lieutenant and an EMT) and attend municipal police academy. The mix of my IT and emergency response experience has lent itself well to my current role at Gordon as Vice President for Administration and Emergency Management Coordinator.
How long have you been using Alertus?
We’ve been a customer for more than 10 years. I first learned about Alertus at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference and became intrigued. We started small and have built out our system over the years. This is one of the things I love about Alertus -- it’s very modular and, because we are resource strained like many institutions, we’ve been able to roll it out slowly as we’ve gained the time and budget.
How do you use your Alertus System?
We use Alertus in a few different ways, including for emergency mass notification, property conservation, and to bridge gaps in monitoring between IT, campus police, and physical security. Fortunately, we haven’t had a critical incident that’s required us to use mass notification, but we do run preparedness tests several times per year.
For mass notification, we are equipped with the Alertus Desktop Activator to push alerts to all our devices on campus such as digital signage overrides. We also have Alert Beacons installed to give us that physical coverage with audible and visual alerting.
In addition, we’ve found Alertus to be helpful in reinforcing responsibilities for our student response team. For example, our campus police department is made up of student-worker dispatchers and full-time patrol officers. One challenge we faced was that when calls came into our student dispatchers, it occasionally took them time to feel confident in figuring out exactly what to do next. With Alertus, we took guesswork and hesitation out of the equation. I love that now, when a call comes in, our protocol automatically appears on the screen for student dispatchers and walks them through exactly what they need to do.
Beyond that, we use Alertus heavily for continuous monitoring to address low-level emergency and property conservation situations.
Your use of Alertus for monitoring is creative, so let’s dive a little deeper. Can you share specifics on the kinds of monitoring you’re doing and what challenges you’ve addressed?
We had a growing need at Gordon to monitor for a variety of things, and I saw the clunky and expensive ways we were doing so around campus. I started looking at some of the problems and playing with the Alert Beacons to see how we might be able to address monitoring issues with contact closures.
For example, a number of our campus fire alarms are monitored by a third party fire alarm monitoring system; however, when something is triggered, it can often take three to five minutes before the monitoring company calls to inform us. I worked with the fire alarm companies to give us contact closures on the fire alarms so they trigger our Alert Beacons and immediately alert our campus dispatcher when an alarm is going off. We do the same thing with our burglar alarms to stay instantly and directly informed when an alarm is triggered. We still maintain our third party burglar alarm monitoring service, too, but it’s good to have peace of mind knowing that we’ll be alerted immediately when an alarm is triggered rather than having to wait minutes to get a call from the service.
We’ve also used Alertus to address challenges with environmental monitoring in our server rooms. The main issue we wanted to watch for was water and temperature, and these two things are very easy to create contact closures on. We have digital thermometers that close when something overheats, and these thermometers are wired into Alert Beacons, generating alerts to notify campus police (who are on-site 24/7) and our head of IT by text message and phone call. The alerts are “smart” in that they provide a precise location and reiterate the importance of the notification until acknowledged. This process has worked multiple times and told us when we were having problems with heat or an HVAC system.
Which Alertus features have been helpful to you in creating these processes at Gordon College?
I’ve been impressed with how easy the Alertus System is to use. The simplicity, flexibility, and power it offers, especially for some of the monitoring we do, is just great. While Alertus won’t necessarily replace primary notification monitoring for things like your burglar alarm system, it greatly speeds up the process. Burglars know it can take multiple minutes for police to be notified of burglar alarm activity, but now that we have our alarms integrated with Alertus, we are able to notify officers instantly.
Can you share some of your plans for the future? How are you looking to expand your notifications?
Since we’re resource constrained, we’ll continue to build out our Alertus System in a modular way as our needs evolve. Next up on the monitoring front: add an alert for our boiler system.
What advice would you give to other Alertus customers who haven’t yet used their systems for non-emergency communications?
I very much understand the thinking behind, “This is an emergency system, don’t use it for anything else.” This may be the right approach for considering whether to blast text messages to an entire organization, but there are so many parts of the Alertus System you can leverage in targeted, strategic ways for different kinds of low-level emergencies and everyday property conservation. We’ve seen significant value in these more “non-traditional” uses at Gordon, and I’d encourage everyone to explore these possibilities for their own organizations.