A valid question was raised by an IU faculty member on Facebook: "Umm... No cell phone notification?  IU will wake me up with a phone call at 3:45 am to tell me that there is someone shooting a gun 5 miles away from where I live, but you won't call in case of a nationwide emergency??"

The answer is this:  "We absolutely will call in the case of a nationwide emergency, and as long as you are directly affiliated with IU, we will call if there is any imminent threat that we could reasonably think might cause you harm. That's not only our policy, the law requires us to, specifically The Clery Act.

This wasn't a full IU-Notify test, it was a test to see if we could activate any part of IU-Notify if the President issues a national EAS. FEMA asked all entities, be they government, school, or private, that have notification capabilities to repeat the test that they conducted. Since we have recently used phone and SMS messages on various campuses in the last several months for actual emergencies, we used this test to focus on finding out how long it takes to send over 250,000 email messages (less than twenty minutes), can we push an emergency message to digital signs on the campuses that have them (yes, but it could be faster), and can we update Facebook and Twitter updates automatically when we activate IU-Notify (yes).

Why do we care about Facebook and Twitter? First of all, it allows us to reach not only people directly affiliated with Indiana University, but people who are interested in the alerts we make. They could be parents of students, people in the community, other universities, or other Emergency Management agencies. Secondly, it allows us to engage our audience in a new way. For instance, your post on the official Indiana University Facebook page: it is unlikely that you would have expressed your concerns in an email or a phone call or by stopping by our offices the way you did here. If people are going to discuss what we do, having a presence on social networks allows us to participate in that discussion. We’ve gotten tweets regarding gas leaks and Facebook questions about community resources for dealing with extreme heat. We have a wealth of information about emergency preparedness, and staying engaged with our audience through social media allows us to share that information with anyone in our community who might benefit from it instead of keeping it all to ourselves

Thirdly, we care about Facebook and Twitter for the same reason that we call, email, text, activate radio systems, change the IU home page, and so on. It’s just another way to reach you. You pointed out that if the Internet wasn’t working, you wouldn’t get a Facebook message and know that there was a problem. Well, if the phones weren’t working and the Internet was, many people would be able to see our alert on social media; that’s a plausible scenario that occurred several summers ago when the northeast lost power across great swaths. If there’s no power, the cell towers don’t work after a certain length of time, but people with generators or dial-up internet (and millions of Americans still use dial-up) could still get online. Long shot? Possibly, but if we can push that message out there at the same time as phone calls and text messages and it doesn’t delay anything, why not? And when we’re pushing out tens of thousands of messages during an emergency, who’s to say that you might not see it faster on Facebook than it will to get that email? While we are pleased to get more than 250,000 emails out in 17 minutes, if you don’t get that email until the sixteenth minute, and your cell phone is dead or you don’t have reception, but you have wi-fi and you’re on Facebook, don’t you still want to know?

And lastly, social media have been a very effective way to add to the information we put out there. If there is a tornado watch, we aren’t going to call you, but we’ll update Facebook. Right after someone threatened students on campus with a gun and then shot into the air, we activated IU-Notify. As information came in that was critical to safety of those affiliated with the University, further messages went out. But you can only put so much information in a text message. At 4am, we were working with our followers to keep them even more informed by putting out additional information that didn’t justify an additional phone call, as well as actively engaging in their questions and concerns.

So, the law requires us to wake you if you are affiliated with the University and there is a significant and imminent threat of harm to members of the University community. We won’t just use Facebook and Twitter in the event of a national, or local, emergency. And we hope you’ll follow us, either at IUEMC on Facebook or @IUEMC on Twitter, because we won’t wake you with a blizzard watch, but if you’re checking online before heading to work in the morning, you might want to know anyway. Thanks!"

Thank you to everyone who received one of the IU-Notify messages and participated in the national EAS test with us.  Rest assured - in the Spring 2012 IU-Notify test, we intend to use text, phone, and many other methods intended to get your attention.  Remember that these tests and the systems are for your life safety!

(Thank you to IUEMC's Jesse Campbell for providing the stellar answer on Facebook!)