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UNHPD implements a new alert system

RAVE! Students, faculty, and community members of Durham, Manchester Law school campuses as well as Granite State College can rejoice in knowing that there is a new and more efficient emergency alert system in place.

Recently, UNHPD has put into place a new and improved emergency alert system that has the hopes to be better and more efficient in getting alerts out to students and faculty in order to maintain a safe, and informed community.

For many years in the past, UNH has been receiving alerts and emergency notifications from a generally reliable system, Roam Secure. This company recently decided to move away from the emergency alert system and into a different market, leaving UNH with a lack of a very necessary system.

UNHPD then was placed to work with a company Everbridge, which is also an emergency alert system, though UNHPD continued research on finding a more technologically advanced and efficient company that would work best for UNH and its students in the long run.

UNHPD soon after found RAVE, a newer and more advanced alert system.

RAVE is a mass notification platform over which the UNH Police Department uses as a public safety alert system that can send timely emergency notifications for a variety of situations.

students, faculty, staff, contractors, families, and alumni will have the ability to choose which alerts are most relevant to them and how they would like to receive these notifications. The UNH Police Department will be using the system for alerts at the Durham, Manchester and Law school campuses as well as Granite State College.

The Universities’ involved will also be offered an option to choose to receive alerts related to heat and cold advisories; which may be relevant to those who work outside, in athletics, or summer camps explains Chief Paul Dean of University of New Hampshire’s Police Department.

Chief Dean also explains that alerts can also be sent out to those for whom mobility is an issue, so they have the ability to know when elevators [on the Durham Campus] are out of service.

The hopes of this new program is that in the event of an emergency, UNHPD will be able to quickly alert anyone in harm’s way and guide them to safety. UNHPD wants to ensure that they will be able to meet their stakeholders where they are by integrating with new technology, social media and whatever else may come in the future.

With hopes to stay in stride with new technology to ensure that this system will continue to be the best option moving forward, UNHPD is consistently trying to find the best options in terms of alert systems that will work the best for students and community members alike.

Chief Dean finds that the RAVE user interface is streamlined and easy to use; he explains that UNHPD’s hope is that users of this new system find this to be true as well.

Chief Dean would also like students to know that RAVE’s system is not connected to UNH credentials, so users will have to create an account, but this has always been the case with past alert systems.

While some of the emergency notifications sent out in the past may have seemed unimportant or maybe even irrelevant based on the information provided, another hope of UNHPD and Chief Dean is to create relevant and important notifications for students on these campuses that have the new system.

“Our hope is that students, faculty and staff will enroll and feel that the information we send to them is relevant and timely. We know that people are bombarded with information all day and night and we hope these notifications are not a nuisance or irrelevant. This is a balance we strive to meet with all information that we share” Chief Dean explains.

RAVE allows UNHPD to use an alert system that has better technological integration than other emergency alert systems used in the past. While the UNH Police Department is already on Twitter and Facebook; RAVE has given the UNHPD the ability to automatically send alerts to their webpage [www.unh.edu/upd] that will then show in an orange banner across the top of the web page.

Additionally, the UNHPD has been able to integrate into the UNH televisions at various locations both on the Durham and Manchester campuses. Emergency Alerts will broadcast over these screens automatically via the RAVE notification system.

As they always have, alerts are sent by personnel in the UNH Police Emergency Communications Center, the UNH Police Department will use RAVE to send information about crimes, hazardous conditions and curtailed operations. The dispatchers are trained to choose which alerts are sent over which outlets – text, email, social media, UNH televisions, and more platforms as they come on-line.

With alerts readily available to get sent to mobile devices for those who sign up to receive notifications, UNHPD is well on its way to creating a safer and more informed community.

“We are excited about how ready RAVE is stay in tune with new technologies! They have been great about working with our current systems in place and offer more that we may choose to integrate moving forward” says Chief Dean.

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