Confirmation of receipt: Proof that your message actually reached your campus community

Getting the right message to the right person at the right time is crucial for colleges and universities. In a life-threatening situation, it’s not enough to send information or updates without ensuring that your target audiences actually received these notifications – in fact, doing so puts a school’s faculty, students, staff, and reputation at risk.

Real-time confirmation ensures your school reaches its target audiences every time it sends a notification, whether it’s alerting students about a class cancellation or the entire campus community about severe weather that is rapidly approaching. With this capability, school officials can send fast, accurate alerts when they confirm an immediate threat to the health and safety of their campus community is present and verify the exact second recipients are notified.

By using an emergency notification system that verifies your recipient confirmed notifications during a critical incident, your school can show it immediately informed its campus community about this event, thereby ensuring Clery Act compliance.

The ability to send notifications through a wide variety of contact paths makes emergency notification systems increasingly valuable to colleges and universities around the country, but many problems could arise if schools simply “blast out” notifications.

It’s important to recognize the difference between message delivery to an open channel and confirmation of receipt. Sending notifications via multiple contact paths is valuable only if recipients get the notification and can respond accordingly. While many emergency notification systems will deliver messages frequently in the hopes of reaching stakeholders during emergencies, confirmation of receipt and on what pathway guarantees a recipient was updated about a critical situation.

An effective emergency notification system stops sending messages when a recipient confirms he or she received the update. For those who have not yet responded, this platform delivers messages to each recipient’s preferred contact paths until he or she confirms receipt.

Confirmation of receipt benefits colleges and universities because it gives schools additional control over their emergency notifications. Utilize an emergency notification system that features confirmation of receipt to improve crisis communications.