Los Angeles Community College District Enhances Emergency Communications with AlertU Platform
Press Releases
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Los Angeles Community College District Enhances Emergency
Communications with AlertU Platform
San Francisco, CA - April 24, 2009 – The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) announced today it will deploy the AlertU emergency alert notification system from Waterfall Mobile. LACCD, the largest community college district in the United States, will deploy AlertU at all nine of its campuses to provide college administrators with a robust mobile emergency alert system.
“LACCD has 135,100 students across nine colleges in the Los Angeles county region and we needed a communication system in place that could quickly and effectively reach our entire school population in an emergency situation,” said Marshall E. Drummond, Chancellor, LACCD. “Waterfall Mobile’s technology helps us strengthen our emergency readiness program with a communications system that conveys and responds to critical information and updates both to and from our students and faculty.”
AlertU provides the LACCD with the ability to send critical text message alerts and emergency updates to the mobile devices of students, faculty and staff in real-time. LACCD administrators can create detailed emergency text messages, send alerts to targeted audiences or broadcast school-wide emergency communications. AlertU has advanced reporting and analytics providing detailed real-time tracking and monitoring. These features, combined with a two-way messaging system, enable colleges to obtain and respond to critical tactical information from first responders and emergency situations.
“Mobile messaging remains the most effective and reliable form of mass communication, making it a necessary component of any emergency response plan,” said Jason Saroyan, of Waterfall Mobile. “AlertU will help LACCD respond to emergencies by instantly conveying crucial information to the school body and helping to field any responses.”
AlertU is a text (SMS) messaging platform developed for enterprises, institutions and school campus communities. With it emergency administrators can now easily send text messages to subscribers’ mobile devices communicating critical information and updates to employees, students, faculty and staff in real-time. The system is an approved technology platform by the Foundation for the California Community Colleges, the official non-profit foundation for the CCC system office. With 72 districts, 110 colleges and over 2.7 million students, the CCC is the largest system of higher education in the United States.
AlertU is available to LACCD students, faculty, staff and the campus community.
About The Los Angeles Community College District
Over the past seventy-seven years we’ve served as educator to more than three million students. Affordable, accessible and practical, the LACCD offers opportunity to all. Our doors are wide open for a diverse student population eager for skills, knowledge and upward mobility. LACCD educates almost three times as many Latino students and nearly four times as many African-American students as all of the University of California campuses combined. Eighty percent of LACCD students are from underserved populations.
Community colleges serve adults of all ages, meeting the needs of a society where “lifelong learning” is the rule and multiple careers and continual retraining are the norm. More than half of all LACCD students are older than 25 years of age, and more than a quarter are 35 or older. More than any other California system of higher education, community colleges offer a first – and a second – chance for anyone who wants to succeed.
For more information on The Los Angeles Community College District please visit: http://www.laccd.edu/.
About Waterfall Mobile
Waterfall Mobile provides enterprise-class technology solutions for mobile CRM, campaign management and emergency communications. Msgme, the company’s flagship product, empowers wireless carriers, brand marketers, agencies, media and entertainment companies to quickly launch creative, interactive text and voice marketing campaigns. The Msgme platform is licensed by companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Nokia, BMW, Sears, Toyota, Warner Music Group and leading agencies including Alloy Media + Marketing, Jack Morton and iconmobile. Waterfall’s emergency alert notification platform, AlertU, is the industry’s first two-way system deployed at numerous organizations and colleges, including the 2.5 million student California Community College system. San Francisco-based Waterfall Mobile was founded in 2005 by a team from E*TRADE, BEA, Oracle and Motricity and is backed by Vista Equity Partners.
For more information on Waterfall Mobile, Msgme, AlertU or other products and services offered by the company, please visit www.waterfallmobile.com, www.msgme.com or www.alertu.com.
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Media Contacts:
Mike Hope and Sabrina Vito
Phone: 1.310.689.7363
Beck Media and Marketing
Email: mike@beckmedia.com; sabrina@beckmedia.com
