Keeping students, staff, faculty, and visitors safe so they can focus on learning, growth, and student experience is the top priority for higher education institutions. With rising campus safety challenges, including student mental health, active assailants, crime, severe weather emergencies, and large-scale event safety, you must ensure you have tools and capabilities that can adapt to your facility’s specific needs.
What makes communicating during crises and emergencies more complex in higher education is that learning environments are often much larger and dispersed across multiple campuses. Getting alerts out, sharing updates and making sure everyone is apprised of what’s happening remains a challenge, but a challenge that technology can help address.
Five capabilities that can help protect students
A central and easily accessible place for safety resources
Your safety resources are way more effective when they can be found easily and all live in one place. Load up important phone numbers, hotlines, mental health resources, escape routes, maps, and other crucial documents or information to a safety app for students to access right from their phones.
Virtual escort capabilities
Late nights in the library are bound to happen in a higher education setting. Making sure students feel safe when they leave after hours or in the dark is crucial for their growth and development at your university. Functionalities like a virtual walk buddy or escort and safety timer allow for loved ones to get in contact with safety officials if a student has taken longer than usual to get to their destination.
Blue light/panic button in your pocket
It’s crucial to give students tools to protect themselves and inform authorities of potential threats. Replace your old blue lights with mobile blue lights that can be deployed straight from a student’s phone.
A mobile panic button provides an instant connection to 9-1-1 and eliminates the need for students to locate the number for campus security or reach a blue light station.
Instant and reliable notifications
A university should ensure that it can quickly and reliably alert students of emergencies, such as fires, severe weather, illness outbreaks, active shooter incidents and lockdowns. On-campus signage and fire alarms only reach students in the local area; email and mobile notifications allow administrators to reach off-campus students who are affected by the emergency.
Anonymous tipping capabilities
Anonymous tipping functionality offers significant benefits in college settings. Students are more likely to report potential threats, like violent behavior or mental health crises, if they can do so anonymously without the risk of retaliation.
Rave Mobile Safety helps universities keep students and faculty safe
Like any other employer, a university has a duty of care toward its employees. Additionally, most legal experts agree that higher education institutions are responsible for taking steps to protect their students. For example, a university can’t stop a severe weather event or fire, but it may be able to prevent an active shooter situation by offering mental health resources and providing students with a way to report potential threats.
Likewise, a university should take steps to keep students and staff members as safe as possible during a crisis. A college should be able to notify faculty, students, and visitors of a crisis and provide them with critical information, such as evacuation or shelter-in-place orders. It’s also important to improve emergency response times as much as possible.
Rave Mobile Safety offers a range of communication solutions to address these issues. Our mass notification system makes it easy for administrators to send emergency alerts to targeted recipients in seconds. We also provide campus security with incident management tools that facilitate clear communication and coordination with local law enforcement. Finally, our personal safety apps offer peace of mind for students and empower them to take safety into their own hands, with endless resources at the tips of their fingers.
At Rave Mobile Safety, we are committed to helping universities protect their people. Our cutting-edge communication tools are easy to use and designed to integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructures. To learn more about our prebuilt and customizable solutions, contact our team.
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