Campus emergency alerts, simplified

One emergency app tries to eliminate student confusion during a campus crisis

It might take days for a college student to gather every piece of information on how to respond to a campus emergency–from assaults, to fires, to shootings and extreme weather.

Detailed on various college sites, brochures, and other campus literature, instructions for how to respond to an emergency are often scattered and disorganized, if not thorough.

That’s why colleges and universities have condensed their emergency notification and response protocol into a single, easy-to-use mobile app called In Case of Crisis, designed to serve as a sort of one-stop shop for students’ emergency needs (and instructions).

Chris Britton, general manager for In Case of Crisis, said many colleges spend uncountable hours creating protocols for how students should respond to incidents like campus shootings or incoming tornadoes, but it’s all for naught when students don’t have immediate access to the vital information.

“Bringing all that [information] together in one place, right there on your phone, is really an important step” in making a college campus more secure, Britton said. “No one is going to have time in the heat of the moment to go and seek out the necessary steps for what they should do during an emergency situation.”

The In Case of Crisis app allows universities to publish their emergency procedures and instructions via an online portal to employees’, students’ and constituents’ Apple, Android, and Amazon Kindle mobile devices.

(Next page: The most important thing in a crisis)