Purdue uses Facebook as part of emergency alert system

INDIANAPOLIS – Purdue University plans to use a popular social networking Web site to contact students and staff in emergencies, and other schools around the state say they are working to improve ways to alert people if needed.\nThe schools’ improvement plans come after Virginia Tech was criticized for notifying students by e-mail more than two hours after the start of an April 16 shooting spree that claimed the lives of 33 people on its Blacksburg, Va., campus.\nPurdue has created an emergency notification group on Facebook, a Web site where users can create profiles, share photos and join networks of users based on interest, affiliation or location.\nFacebook is part of the school’s multi-pronged emergency alert plan that also includes sirens, phone trees and e-mail alerts, Purdue spokeswoman Jeanne Norberg said Wednesday.\n“Right now we don’t have a technique that is 100 percent foolproof, so we are trying to look at all the ways we can communicate with students,” Norberg said.\nMore than 2,600 people had already joined the group after word spread Tuesday across the West Lafayette campus about the page, according to Norberg. She said 85 percent of Purdue students use the site, and 65 percent access it daily.\nFacebook offers several methods of delivering group messages, including text messages and e-mails, but does not allow a group administrator to push out more than 1,000 messages at one time. Norberg said the school is negotiating with the company to find out if it can send more than the limit in rare circumstances.\nOther schools across the state also planned to upgrade their systems for communicating with students and staff during emergencies.\nSome were considering text-messaging programs that would allow officials to contact students on their cell phones. The programs could provide a quicker method to reach students than mass e-mailings, which can take several hours.\n“While colleges and universities have always known that timely communications are important in the event of a crisis, the timeframe of expectation was much longer before Virginia Tech,” said Ball State spokesman Tony Proudfoot. “With technology and the event at Virginia Tech, what college and universities are now saying is we’re not talking about a timeframe of hours, but a timeframe of minutes.”\nThe University of Notre Dame was also considering using Facebook as part of its emergency communication plan, spokesman Dennis Brown said.\nNotre Dame will be piloting a program for sending messages instantaneously over cell phones this spring and summer, and hopes to have the system in place by the fall semester, Brown said. He declined to name the vendor the school is negotiating with while the program is being tested.\nIU spokesman Larry McIntyre said on May 4 the school will test a method for sending voice messages over the tornado warning loudspeakers on its Bloomington campus. He said officials are also researching text messaging programs.\n“If you are on any campus anywhere in the country, you’ll notice that students are on their cell phones constantly, talking or send text messages,” McIntyre said. “Kids are very plugged into the latest electronic technology, so we’re going take to advantage of that.”