“Peeling back” the layers of communications for one university's emergency notification strategy

"You want to have as many layers of notification as possible."  So says Travis Bryant, public safety director for Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, NC.  Bryant goes on to describe the system the university deployed as "a comprehensive solution that ensures that our people will receive notification regardless of where they are on campus.  The solution provides peace of mind for everyone."

With more than 6,000 students, faculty and staff, Fayetteville State identified a mission-critical need for campus-wide alerting as the best way to ensure the safest most secure environment possible.  They ultimately decided on a campus safety and security solution features a digital network capable providing both tone-alerts and voice announcements that can be heard throughout the campus.

The siren network employs a controller that is integrated with an encoder to ensure secure and reliable siren activation by campus safety officials.  The siren plugs into a Federal Signal SmartMsg-enabled industry platform that supports simultaneous activation of sirens and alerting to cell phones, land lines, radios, PDAs, pagers, e-mail addresses and other indoor warning devices.

This comprehensive safety and security platform provides distributed instant messaging and scenario management architecture that spotlights instant scalability, redundancy and automated fail-over features to support thousands of users across hundreds of servers.

Sirens, public address systems, e-mail, social media and so much more.  In a remarkably short period of time there has been a dramatic proliferation in the number of ways we communicate.  In the case of Fayetteville State University, once again the trick seems to be to look at each of these communication mediums as a layer in an overall mass notification strategy.