Send Word Now's second emergency notification test reached more students in less time than the first, according to Dawn Irish, associate director of outreach for the University Information Technology (UIT) department.
The March 26 test "was even more effective than the last one, largely due to some tweaking done by the vendor to fix some of the minor issues we had been facing," Irish said.
Administrators can use the Send Word Now system in the case of a campus emergency to immediately contact students, faculty and staff members with automated messages.
During the test, which UIT administered on March 26, 98.5 percent of those signed up received notification within four minutes, a marked improvement from the previous test. That adds up to 16,782 phone calls and 8,535 SMS text messages.
In the first test, administered on Nov. 14, it took 25 minutes to make 16,102 phone calls, and eight minutes to send 8,072 SMS text messages.
Even students who had not signed up for the system received the messages by e-mail as long as they had a Tufts account.
Some registered people did not receive notifications due to issues unassociated with Send Word Now, like technical problems with their own cell phone networks and incorrectly recorded cell phone numbers, Irish said. Other calls went unanswered.
Tufts' emergency system is already working better than those at a number of other schools, according to Mely Tynan, vice president and chief information officer for UIT.
"There are several factors that made ours more successful," Tynan said in an e-mail. "First, it was given high priority by Tufts ... being able to notify our community of emergencies or crisis became very clear, following Virginia Tech," she said, referring to the campus shooting there last year.
President Lawrence Bacow announced last summer that he wanted the Send Word Now system in place by the time students arrived in the fall for the current school year. He supported Tynan in association with Mary Jeka, vice president of university relations, and John King, senior director of public safety. According to Tynan, most preparations were completed before freshman orientation.
Although some other schools have similar systems, not all of them have coordinated theirs with their information technology departments, resulting in technical issues.
At one school, "e-mail notification did not get through because it was flagged as a large spam attack by their network," Tynan said. "In another case, the campus telephone system could not handle the load of the emergency calls."
Tynan said inter-department coordination prevented many of these issues from plaguing Tufts.
"Our groups worked very well together, engaging various contact points across campuses as we selected, tested and implemented the system," she said. "Campus police, PR, web staff, email staff, phone staff, IT help desk - all were engaged fully in this important project."
Jeka feels there are still challenges for Send Word Now. "Faculty and staff were the easy part," she said, "but now we need to get as many students signed up as possible."
Irish confirmed that UIT has not yet received any negative feedback on the emergency system. "At this point we're pretty happy with the performance of the system," she said. "We believe that if there was an emergency tomorrow, we would be able to notify students in time, but we're trying to take advantage of every opportunity we have to improve the system."
The next test will be conducted next semester.
