Two more universities have signed up with TipNow, the San Jose, Calif.-based text messaging service designed to increase campus safety by allowing students to anonymously notify campus security personnel regarding non-emergency suspicious activity. California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Conn., are now offering the new service from Resiligence, Inc., […]

Heartland Payment Systems’ Campus Solutions division is integrating its Campus OneCard with Alert Notification, a nationwide membership service that provides a 24-hour-a-day call center to alert family when an accident or medical emergency occurs. Students who sign up for the Alert Notification system will have their Alert Notification numbers on their OneCards. If an incident […]

University campuses have gotten smaller, not in terms of physical layout, but in the time it takes to reach out to a student. Land line telephones are old news as students are tethered to their cell phone. The challenge for many college administrators today is how can they put that cell phone to work for […]

Chicago State University has launched a wireless mobile safety tool that can turn cell phones into location-aware devices that instantly connect users with campus police. Chicago State University is the first school in Illinois to install Rave Guardian that enables campus police to keep tabs on students who have signed up for the program. CSU […]

Students and staff at Oakland University, Rochester, Mich., will now receive a text message and a voice mail under a new alert system that has gone into effect. The alerts are part of the school’s comprehensive emergency communications plan to notify students, faculty and staff as quickly as possible if an emergency situation occurs on […]

Attempting to keep its students notified in cases of emergencies or threats to their safety, Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, Mo. has launched its “Bearcat Alert,” a text messaging system designed to get the word out quickly. While Bearcat Alert is open to those with a Northwest account, students still must sign up for the […]

Higher One, a financial services provider to colleges and universities, has signed up 15 more institutions for its OneDisburse Refund Management program. That brings to 109 the number of schools using the Higher One platform, a 15% growth since the beginning of 2008. Those signing up since January, representing 173,000 students, include: Austin Community College, […]

Text messaging to alert students about emergency events are great, provided they are delivered in a timely manner and aren’t truncated so much as to render the original message worthless. Or, as in the case recently at Florida State University, encompasses more than was originally intended. Recently, a text message sent out about a suspicious […]

Colleges have other options for cell phone alerts, of course. They could go off campus and hire a company specializing in text messaging. That’s what Rave Wireless and Mobile Campus are offering to universities. Rave offers what its COO, Raju Rishi, calls “an alert solution, which basically gives the university the ability to get emergency […]

Campus Management Corporation has made the June release of CampusPortal™ 9.0 inclusive of a text messaging solution for students and staff. At no additional cost to the institution, the technology enables instant campus-wide communication in the event of emergencies, weather, and other critical news to be transmitted to students and staff quickly. Campus Management Provides […]