Emergency Conference Bridging – Does It Take Long to Get Your Key Personnel on Call?

When there is an active shooter emergency that forces your college or university community to lock down and shelter-in-place, a fire that threatens your faculty members, staff, and students, forcing them to evacuate school grounds, or a power outage that brings your school’s everyday operations to a screeching halt…how long does it take you to get key personnel convened onto a conference call to figure out next steps?

In an active crisis, college and university administrators need to be able to alert and convene key personnel instantly. With an emergency notification system that includes conference bridging capabilities, a school accelerates its emergency coordination and response.

A single-click conference bridge enhances critical communications by connecting school administrators with campus security, other public safety officials, and the school’s media relations through on-the-fly message notification. At higher education institutions, utilizing conference bridging notifications provides a redundant solution to efficiently manage an emergency, without the need for additional hardware or software, and leverages conference calls to brief a school’s emergency response team and determine next steps.

So how exactly does it work and how can a school benefit from an emergency notification system that includes conference bridging capabilities?

Individuals simply press the number 1 on their phone after listening to the message, on why they are convening, and are automatically transferred into the conference bridge.

Recently, a school used Everbridge conference bridging during an active shooter emergency. With this technology, Everbridge was able to find and connect 26 senior-level personnel with campus police via a conference call in 86 seconds while simultaneously sending a campus-wide notification to faculty, staff, and students to lock down and shelter-in-place. Quickly, they were able to determine who knew what about the active shooter, what steps to take, and when to reconvene on another conference bridge.

Utilizing an emergency notification system that includes conference bridging notifications should be a top priority for college and university officials. Connecting with key personnel, regardless of their location and without delays or interference, and ensuring fast, effective response to life-threatening incidents is priceless when safeguarding the most important assets – people.

Does your notification provider include conference bridging? If it doesn’t, then you have to ask yourself, “How much critical time does your school waste by not having this capability?”