In light of the recent tragedy at Umpqua Community College, a college in neighboring California is on high alert.
According to local news site Your Central Valley, Fresno State and their community are trying to learn for the situation in Oregon and be as proactive as they can at their school.
"Every incident is different," Fresno State Police Department spokesperson Amy Luna told Your Central Valley. "What we try to do is we try to look at what happened and learn from it, and say, 'Is there something that we haven't thought of yet that we could be doing to protect our campus?'"
To that end, the school recently launched a text alert system to help quick spread information throughout campus in emergencies.
Called the Bulldog Alert system after the school's mascot, was tested in late September before being implemented last week.
To that proactive sentiment Luna discussed, the school took a unique approach to gaining subscribers. Though there is a traditional opt in system set up, the school initially signed up students from phone numbers included in enrollment profiles, totaling roughly 22,000 students.
During the test, students were asked to confirm their receipt of the message. Luna said that most responses were received within the first few minutes, with the latest coming in only 16 minutes after the message was sent.
While Luna admitted that some of the numbers may have been old and, as such, a message was not received, the school would rather be safe than sorry.
"We'd rather send it to an old number than no number at all, or just because they didn't confirm, it doesn't mean that it's not right, so we want to make sure that they get the message in an emergency," she told the university's news outlet, The Collegian.
The response times are a good, real world example of the quick responses business can expect to receive form an SMS marketing campaign.
