Cooper Notification tour extended

HOUSTON - Cooper Notification will extend its mass notification systems road tour of U.S. colleges, which began in Washington in January, through the summer, the company announced Feb. 19. During the next several months, Cooper Notification will be holding demonstrations, talking to its dealers and instructing emergency officials and university administrators how to effectively communicate to students, staff and the public before, during and after an event. At the end of February, Paula Alves, channel manager for Cooper Notification, was finishing up a swing through New England where the company visited several colleges and prep schools. “We bring in our mobile demonstration and show our multi-layered solution, which covers indoor, outdoor as well as portable [email and cell phone] alerting,” she said. “You don’t have to deploy all layers of the solution at one time, and as needs change they can deploy other pieces of the solution,” she said. The interest in mass notification systems has clearly been spurred on by recent tragedies on college campuses, she said. In some instances, school administrators were told to “get a system in place tomorrow.” Now these same administrators are looking to fill in any gaps. Some customers have partial notification systems in place “through fire and voice evacuation systems and are looking [for example] for an outdoor solution.” The Cooper Notification system can tie into existing infrastructure—fire, access control system, current security or paging systems. “It’s flexible enough, scalable enough to do that,” said Alves. And while this tour is focused on educational institutions, the solution is appropriate for any corporate campus, she said. States currently included in the tour are: Florida, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Southern California, Nevada, Eastern Texas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York and Washington, DC. SSN