Northeastern Voice

Waking up to NU Alert

The university is working to fine-tune its NU Alert emergency contact system after encountering some glitches when it was put to use on January 14.

Faculty, staff and students were notified early that morning of the university's closing due to a snowstorm. The notices came via e-mail, text messages and telephone calls, based on the contact information provided by community members through the MyNEU web portal.

Inadvertently the notices also went to the "emergency contacts" of faculty, staff and students, many of whom reside in other parts of the country and were alarmed by the recorded message.

The team managing the new system is conducting a thorough review of the data to ensure that emergency contacts are eliminated from future non-emergency communications and to verify that all contacts in the system are indeed affiliated with the university.

Members of the Northeastern community do not need to change or remove any emergency contact information.

The team also decided that going forward only text messages will be issued for weather related campus closings, eliminating phones from ringing in the pre-dawn hours. As has traditionally been the practice, the university will publicize snow closings on local television and radio, on the website, and at (617) 373-2000.

For more information about NU Alert, please see http://www.northeastern.edu/publicsafety/nualert.html.