Chances are you’ve benefited from a mass notification system many times in your life. From morning announcements at school to public announcements at a fair, mass notification systems make it easy to transmit information to a large group of people at once. They can also be useful in alerting individual people to crucial information.
If you’re at a hospital and you ever hear a doctor called over the PA for a code, this is a mass notification system communicating critical information. This is especially useful in hospitals because oftentimes you’re asked to turn off your phone. If someone needs you but can’t reach you because of this, they can call the hospital and ask you be paged over the mass notification system.
These are all the most basic elements to a mass notification system. Today, these systems can accomplish far more complicated tasks. They can be programmed with a number of responses in case of emergency, so an entire building or location can be notified in the case of fire, tornado, health crisis, active shooter, or any other emergency.
Mass notification systems today don’t just use a PA system either. They can send out text alerts, e-mails, social media private messages, and phone calls in the case of an emergency. This builds in redundancies to help keep people safe. If someone’s in a file room where they can’t hear the PA, they’ll still get a notification on their phone. If an employee isn’t in to work yet, and they get an alert about their building, they know not to enter and put themselves in harm’s way.
Mass notification systems are custom to fit different organizations’ needs. There’s even more to mass notification systems than this. If you have questions, we’re happy to answer.