The Department of Public Safety and Security will be conducting a test of the new AU Alert system Wednesday afternoon.
AU Alert is the system of email, text and voice notifications that informs its subscribers of anything from severe weather to a strange odor in a building.
It has recently undergone some changes, and of them, possibly the most important will be the improved response time of the notifications.
"We had a five year contract with the former vendor and their performance was satisfactory, but it was time to rebid the service. And we did have some concerns over that five year period from students in particular about speed of text message delivery. And so we wanted to make sure when we were rebidding it that that was one of our priorities, was to get the best speed on text message deliver y that we could," said Susan McCallister, associate director of public safety information and education.
Some student's current opinions of AU Alert were in line with McCallister's assessment. Two students, who were interviewed separately, both expressed the same discontent with the speed of AU Alert's notifications.
Shannon, a freshman in aerospace engineering, who declined to give her last name, said the system does make her feel safer on campus, but only on the occasion that she receives the notifications on time. One instance she noted was receiving an alert about an event a day after it had occurred.
Another student, Chris Bontrager, a public administration major who has been at Auburn for three years, said that out of the messages he receives, a number of them are late. He also said that if there was one thing he could change about the service it would be the response time.
"Each time that we sent an alert we would look at the result and talk with our vendor, and they would adjust the system to make it as efficient as possible. And they were very good work with but like I said that when we started to rebid it they said 'Look this is really probably the best that we are going to be able to do,'" McCallister said.
After considering various suppliers of emergency notification services, and consulting with other universities about their experiences with them, the department decided to go with a company named Rave Mobile Safety, which ensured that their response time was faster than the current provider.
McCallister said that the only actions they wanted to see taken by students regarding this change was to update their information with the AU Alert system, and for those students who still have not subscribed to subscribe.
About 70 percent of the student body is subscribed to the service she said, and the department's desire is to get as close to 100 percent subscription as possible.
There will also be new features provided, one of which is called AU Outages. It is a service that will notify subscribers on campus to how substantial a power outage is and that it is acknowledged and being fixed.
The AU Alert service can be found by entering an AU Access account and selecting the Campus Life tab.
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