A flurry of emails, text messages and telephone calls shot across campus last Friday afternoon in a largely successful test of the University's new emergency alert process, the Princeton Telephone and Email Notification System (PTENS).
The system's test improved in both scope and efficacy in its second run-through since its purchase by the University last April, University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt '96 said.
"One of our most significant findings is the total increase in people in the system," Cliatt said.
In all, 18,634 phone numbers belonging to 14,869 different community members were called during the test, which began at 1 p.m. Friday.
In contrast, 14,591 phone calls were made in the first test of the system last May.
"Seventy percent of the phones that were reached during this test were reached during the first five minutes," Cliatt said.
Overall, 79.6 percent of registered phones successfully received either live calls or voicemail messages. The remaining calls were not completed due to bad numbers, busy signals or lack of voicemail capability.
This figure fell from a rate of 86 percent in the previous test. The total number of phones reached, however, increased from 12,450 in May to 14,835 last Friday.
The system also reached a greater number of individuals through email and text messages. Within the first two minutes of the test, 17,280 community members received emails.
The text messaging system saw the greatest increase in participation.
"At first, people had to enter SMS information directly into the system. Now we could use existing cell phone data and send messages to people asking them to 'opt-in,' " Cliatt said.
The change allowed 6,604 individuals to receive text message notifications, up from 1,011 in the spring.
Cliatt attributed this and other increases to months-long efforts to expand participation in the program.
In addition to the "opt-in" text message program, the University worked with the registrar's office to integrate contact information entry into the SCORE course registration interface, and last week Public Safety sent out over 2,000 emails to individuals who did not have any information in the database.
The outreach effort focused in part on graduate students not included in the notification database.
"Almost 2,500 individuals were not included in the May test due to not having a number in the phone system, and the vast majority were grad students. Since then, the number of individuals [without phone information] has dropped to just over 1,000," Cliatt said.
Cliatt said the University will use the results of the test to further improve the system, which, once perfected, will ideally serve the campus in ways extending beyond emergency response.
"We don't see this as a security system exclusively more generally a notification system. It's not only for certain issues when immediate safety is in jeopardy. It can be used to notify students of other issues, such as building problems or flooding in certain parts of campus," Cliatt said.
Most students on campus expressed satisfaction at the system's demonstration.
"I think it's an effective way to communicate that there's an emergency," Anna Shapiro '11 said. "With text messaging especially, I think that there will be instant notification."
Not all students, however, experienced the full spectrum of notification delivery.
"I didn't get anything but an email," Elizabeth Borges '11 said.
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