By Leah Wilkinson
With weather delays, water main breaks and everything in between, Bellarmine University students have received a lot of emergency alerts lately.
Jason Cissell, assistant vice president of strategic and integrated communication, said there are two levels of alerts the university sends to students, faculty and staff.
“One, there are the automated alerts that we send out that go out via text, email, Twitter, the website, and the second is TV stations,” Cissell said.
Cissell said emergency alerts include things like school closures, switches to remote learning, power outages, floods and active aggressors.
“Our deal on emergency alerts, and the way we encourage people to sign up for them, is that we will only use them for emergency communication,” Cissell said. “We won’t use it for promotional purposes — it’s strictly for emergency information we think you need to know at this moment.”
As the Bellarmine community knows, an emergency alert was used this week to encourage people to enter campus via Norris Place instead of Newburg Road due to ice on Newburg’s hills.
“That kind of rose to the level of health and safety — someone could’ve been harmed,” Cissell said.
Cissell said text alerts typically also have corresponding email, which each member of the Bellarmine community receives as well. Cissell said the email messages often provide more information than the typical one to two-sentence alerts.
“We used to just let the same text alert go to email just in case people were checking their emails or picked up their phones,” Cissell said.
Bellarmine students have mixed feelings about receiving the text and email alerts.
“My thoughts are that email is the best way to get me any sort of information,” junior Abby Pitts said. “I think at Bellarmine we try to use a lot of different modalities and encourage people to use every modality, so you get things on Instagram, you get things text alerted, you get things on GroupMe.”
Pitts said although she knows the notifications are important, she believes it’d be better if she didn’t receive them in multiple locations.
Senior commuter Cass Marlow said she also feels the notifications can be redundant.
“I usually get the text message ones, and then like 10 minutes later, the email one comes through,” Marlow said.
Marlow said she wishes there were a way to customize which alerts she receives, as only some apply to her as a commuter.
“I wish there was a way to be like, ‘I only want the weather alert ones,’ because obviously those are ones that affect me coming to campus,” Marlow said. “The weather ones have been relevant because obviously I need to know if class is cancelled or there’s a two-hour delay or whatever.”
Marlow said it would be nice if the school could alert students of accidents on surrounding roads like Newburg.
“So, then I’m like maybe two minutes late to class instead of, like, 10,” she said.
Marlow said she also feels like some alerts create more fear than they do awareness, such as alerts regarding thefts.
Cissell said the alert system doesn’t currently have customizable options, so everyone receives the same messages.
“The system we use doesn’t have that level of data built into it right now – it’s simply a collection of phone numbers and email addresses,” Cissell said. “It could be something we explore in the future.”
Cissell said the goal is to get people all the information they need as quickly as possible.
“We wanted to distribute it through as many platforms as we could, but with the uniqueness of changes this year and the fact that we’ve never done it like this before when there’s severe weather and the changes are planned, it made sense to include some things you can’t squeeze into a text in that email just to provide a little more guidance,” Cissell said. “And that’s probably something we’ll continue to do.”
When it comes to closings or delays, Cissell said the Bellarmine marketing department reports to TV stations so they can release that information to the rest of the community.
“Local TV stations have their own platforms for educational institutions and major employers in Louisville to go in and report their status in a winter storm or other emergency,” Cissell said.
Cissell said there are sometimes linguistic differences between stations, which is why people may sometimes see “remote” learning on one station and “virtual” learning on another.
“So, in most cases, the TV stations choose the terms, and we pick the one that’s most applicable,” Cissell said. “There can be some difference in terminology but I think we hit a point where having WHAS say ‘remote learning’ versus not putting it on WHAS, we choose the term that fits most closely our circumstances.”
Cissell said he wants the Bellarmine community to know how important it is they receive alerts.
“We would encourage anyone who’s not signed up for the system to know we’re not going to spam you with promotional material,” he said. “It’s really just information we think you need to know urgently.”
Members of the Bellarmine community can register to receive text alerts by texting “buknights” to 226-787 from their mobile device.