Charleston Southern University has adopted TechRadium’s Immediate Response Information System (IRIS) in order to communicate emergency messages to students, their families, faculty and staff. Within minutes, IRIS communicates emergency messages to cell phones, home phones, PDAs, e-mail, pagers and fax machines.
“Charleston Southern needed a system that was reliable and easily administered,” said Rusty Bruns, CSU’s chief information officer. “The required system would use both e-mail and another method such as cell or home phone to contact students, faculty, staff and families to ensure the message had more than one avenue for information broadcast.”
“Another feature was important – verification of notification. It was important for the University to know that the message reached the intended recipient. Finally, it must be easy to implement and fully functional by the fall semester. A lot of requirements, and only the summer to research, select and implement the new system,” Bruns said.
CSU began working with the program in June and recently conducted a system test, contacting all faculty and staff.
“I entered the one-line text message ‘This is a test of CSU’s notification system’ and hit ‘send,’” said Bruns. “From start to finish the process was less than three minutes. Within five minutes of sending the test message, a report was generated listing the notification verification. The verification read ‘human answered or voice mail was left.’ The entered text message was translated to voice.”
Now that CSU students are back to school and have registered their phones and other electronic contact information, a full test including all students is scheduled for September.
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