Campus Safety encourages phone number registration
By Matthew Purucker · News Editor
Grove City College is encouraging students and faculty to sign up for text message alerts from Omnilert.
Omnilert is the emergency notification system the college uses to warn the campus community about concerns ranging from weather emergencies to swatting calls.
According to a Tuesday email from Director of Campus Safety Seth Van Til, “a severe weather warning, gas leak, fire, bomb threat, crime watch, power failure or other event” are all dangers Omnilert can quickly report to students and college employees, instructing them on what to do.
“We use it to communicate information that is critical for the community to know,” Van Til said.
As part of this campaign, the college is running a test of the Omnilert system at 11:50 a.m. on Friday. The test involves sending an Omnilert message to email addresses and phone numbers in the system and activating the on-campus siren to alert people who are outside on campus.
In an emergency, these messages provide critical information to the community,” Van Til said. “They contain the most up-to-date information available to the college.”
In the Tuesday email, Van Til also encouraged students and college employees to ensure their contact information is correct and in the Omnilert system ahead of Friday’s test. He added steps to make sure students and faculty could receive text alerts at the end of the email.
“The only way to receive voice or text messages in an emergency is to follow the process outlined (in the email) to add your phone and text number and complete the verification process,” Van Til said. “If you do not follow all steps and verify your number, it will not be added to the system.”
“All student emails are entered into the system by the college. … Adding phone numbers requires a verification process and can only be done by the owner of the phone number.
Students can also add parents or emergency contacts to the Omnilert system by typing in their phone numbers and emails.
The Sept. 29 swatting call motivated the college to seek to increase the number of phone numbers in the Omnilert system. During the incident, the system notified 4043 emails, 893 texts and 764 voicemails, reaching a total of 4,354, per Van Til.
“Our concern is that only 893 text messages were sent to verified phone numbers,” Van Til said. “With approximately 2,800 college students and staff, this means that only a third of our community members received text messages, texts being the most immediate notification stream.”
“We know that students don’t always check their email, and that’s a problem when we’re trying to notify them of an emergency or dangerous situation on campus that’s happening in real time,” Nick Hildebrand, director of College Communications, said.
“The best way to get the word out to the campus community is via text, so it’s important for everyone on campus to get their phone numbers into the system.”
If students and faculty do not receive Friday’s message as a text, phone call and email, Campus Safety has suggested that members of the campus community update their contact information by visiting the college’s Omnilert website (gcc.omnilert.net) and following the instructions listed in Tuesday’s email from Van Til.
