Incoming text message. It’s from Raven Alerts letting the campus know of severe weather, school closings or a campus emergency. Fortunately for the BC community, they are not used very often.
Raven Alerts are used to offer an emergency notification via texts, e-mails and voice messages.
“You have not received any messages so far this academic year, since thankfully, there have been no emergencies, weather closing, or any other reason deemed critical enough to initiate the system,” said Steve Johnson, director of marketing and communications.
“There are many misconceptions about the Raven Alerts,” Johnson said. “It is not a marketing tool. This system is an emergency alert system. It will only be used in the case of weather or safety emergencies…so the hope is actually that we never have to use it.”
The alert system is available to all U.S. phone carriers and is set up for any Benedictine College student, staff or faculty member to subscribe to.
The text messages can be identified by their short codes of 67283 or 226787.
“We shifted to a new system this year that should be more reliable. We had problems with the previous vendor not being able to guarantee delivery to AT&T phones (a major provider in the area) and delaying delivery for hours…and sometimes days,” Johnson said. “This was not a good situation for handling emergency communication.
So the college investigated other vendors and found a very reliable source. The new system automatically uploaded everybody’s BC e-mail addresses and all cell phone numbers available.”
Students, faculty and staff not already signed up to receive these messages can go to the Benedictine website under “Quick Links” on the left-hand navigation. Click on Raven Alerts at the top of the “Frequently Asked Questions” page. At the top of the page, the link leads to the login page for Alerts. The username for your login is your Benedictine College e-mail address.
“The system we now have is web-based on remote servers, so it would not be affected by our local servers. If the local servers are down, I can initiate an alert from my cell phone or by calling 24/7 on a landline to the system administrators,” Johnson said.
The system is set up for the safety and protection of those on campus so that in any situation when students, faculty and staff need to be contacted, BC can reach the most people in a short amount of time.
“It is set up for redundancy, so if one system fails, another type of message will get through,” Johnson said, “The system is capable of sending an e-mail alert, a text alert to a cell phone, and a voice alert to any phone.
“Depending on the situation, we can choose to use one or all of these methods in an effort to reach as many students, faculty and staff as possible.”
The only messages that will be sent out are official Benedictine College emergency communications, not spam or advertisements.
These emergencies do not include alerts about temporary disruptions of Internet service.
