3 Tips to Make Sure Students Don’t Ignore School Notifications

As any marketing or advertising executive will tell you, it’s very difficult to get and maintain the attention of young people, be it in person, online or on social media. They have their own lives, their own priorities, and they are constantly bombarded by digital noise and messages.

These factors make it a challenge for school administrators who want to use mass communication systems as an emergency tool. If you send out an alert and nobody responds because they ignored it, your system isn’t doing you any good.

Fortunately, there are some best practices you can adopt at your Memorial, TX school to ensure your students are seeing and responding to your alerts. If you want to know more, keep reading.

SEE ALSO: How Can You Keep Students Safe During Sporting Events?

MARKET THE SYSTEM

You likely inform students, staff and parents about your school’s mass notification system at the beginning of the school year. That’s great, but you need to do more to promote your system and get everyone to adopt it. Students are adjusting to new classes and overloaded with paperwork at the beginning of the year, and it’s easy for things to get lost in the shuffle.

Promote your mass notification system year-round if you want as many people as possible to sign up. Use your school’s social media accounts, post information on student-centric pages on your website, set up booths or tables in high-traffic areas, and so on. It doesn’t have to be constant, but regular reminders in different formats will increase the number of people who sign up for your system.

KEEP MESSAGES RARE AND RELEVANT

As we mentioned before, your students are being hit with a barrage of digital noise, messages and notifications during their every waking moment. If you send out an alert, it will likely just be one among many that they receive at any given moment. But if your gunshot detection system is activated and you need to get emergency information out in a hurry, you can’t take the chance that students or others will ignore your alert.

To make your notifications stand out, keep them rare and relevant. Only use the system in genuine crises. Otherwise, the alerts become just more digital background noise. On the other hand, if your students know and expect that an alert from the school means something serious is happening, they’ll pay better attention to whatever you send.

Additionally, keep your messages short and to-the-point. Don’t use overly flowery language and give the recipients specific actions they can take. You can direct them to additional information with a website link, but keep the message itself punchy.

TEST THE SYSTEM

Running tests may seem counter to keeping messages rare, but both steps are working toward the same end: Building trust in the system among your school community. Real alerts should be rare, but tests also help people have faith in your notification system. Regular tests show you take school security seriously. Just make sure to notify everyone beforehand; if students aren’t expecting an alert and receive a test message, they’re much more likely to assume the next notification will also be a test, undermining the system’s effectiveness.

We have extensive experience with smart technology projects for schools. From surveillance cameras to mass communication systems, we do it all. Call us today at (877) 418-ASAP, or visit our contact page to set up a consultation.