To more effectively reach students with emergency information, the campus is adding the mobile phone numbers of students to its WarnMe notification system to support text messaging.

All student numbers are scheduled to be included by the start of fall quarter instruction on Sept. 25.

UC Davis uses the WarnMe system to provide students, staff, faculty and others with timely information during emergencies and other urgent situations. To those who have a ucdavis.edu email address, it can send WarnMe and Aggie Alert messages by email and — if mobile numbers have been added — by text. Messages are also posted to the Everbridge Mobile App and UC Davis’ official X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook accounts.

Until now, students had been asked to voluntarily add numbers for personal mobile phones. In the 2023-24 academic year about 18,000 — or less than half of the student population — did so.

Idea from emergency exercise

The effort to add student mobile numbers to WarnMe was prompted by discussion during a September tabletop exercise of the Emergency Policy Group, about a dozen campus leaders who make high-level decisions in emergency response and recovery. They wanted to be able to reach more students by text.

Pablo Reguerín, vice chancellor for Student Affairs, is a member of the policy group. “The safety of the campus community is our highest priority,” he said. “We are instituting this change as one of several recent enhancements to campus safety efforts.”

When messages are being sent to thousands of individuals in an emergency, text messages can be delivered more quickly than emails and be noticed by recipients more easily, said Benton Best, campus emergency manager.

“It’s critical to reach our campus community with what could be life-saving information,” Best said. “We have brought on board the mobile numbers of thousands more students so we can also send them messages by text, a mode of communication they use even more than email.”

Since last fall, Best and staff from Informational and Educational Technology, the Office of the University Registrar, Strategic Communications and Student Affairs have worked on the project. They have explored legal, technical and communications issues.

Federal law and university policy allow the campus to use the mobile numbers for health and safety emergency purposes. 

The university is notifying students about the use of their phone numbers as their school year begins, and information has been incorporated into orientation materials for incoming undergraduates. The change is also being shared through student newsletters, the campus News and Information page, the WarnMe website and later, WarnMe tests.

UC Davis will join UC Riverside among campuses importing phone numbers from student information systems to emergency notification systems. The phone numbers UC Davis will add are being drawn from records in the Banner student information system. While not all phone numbers in Banner are identified as mobile, nearly all are assumed to be mobile numbers. 

Updating WarnMe, other records

Students and others may update their WarnMe contact information and opt out of receiving text alerts at any time by visiting the WarnMe Information website. Periodically, the Student Information System prompts students to provide or update their WarnMe contact information.

Changes students make for the WarnMe system do not update other university records. Students should also update information for University Registrar records.

Parents, vendors and others without a UC Davis email address can sign up to receive WarnMe and Aggie Alert messages — that the Davis campus distributes by text — by texting UCDALERTS to 888777.

 Members of the campus community (Davis locations only) may also download the Everbridge Mobile App to receive UC Davis WarnMe and Aggie Alert messages. This is an important option for those with international phone numbers, because WarnMe does not send text messages to international numbers.

Related work

Webpages about WarnMe are being updated to reflect the automatic inclusion of students’ mobile phone numbers for text messages.

In the next steps of the project, the University Registrar will work with Graduate Studies and the professional schools to ensure student mobile numbers are captured and students are made aware these numbers will be used for contacting them with WarnMe alerts.

In addition, the project is identifying best practices for when to purge from WarnMe the records of students who have separated or graduated from the university.

Later, mobile numbers for employees’ university-issued cell phones will be added to WarnMe. Currently, employees may opt in to receive WarnMe text messages with their university-issued or personal mobile numbers at any time.

WarnMe test Oct. 17

The campus will hold the first of three scheduled WarnMe tests for the academic year on Oct. 17 to coincide with the Great California Shakeout and International ShakeOut Day. In addition to being distributed by email and text, the WarnMe test messages will also post to the Everbridge Mobile App and UC Davis’ official X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook accounts.

At its most basic, the ShakeOut is a one-minute drill at 10:17 a.m. to encourage participants to practice the instructions of “drop, cover and hold on” as if a major earthquake was happening. The event is organized by the Earthquake Country Alliance, a public-private partnership to improve earthquake and tsunami preparedness, mitigation and resiliency.