During Crises

Whether conducting day-to-day or time-sensitive communications, educational institutions today need fast and cost effective ways to communicate to students and staff who might be dispersed across campuses and around the world. Furthermore, with the ever-increasing threat of security breaches, it is becoming even more critical to have in place robust and coordinated plans and an ability to respond quickly to unexpected events or crises.

What is OCA?

OCA Professional is a web-based information management and crisis communications system that enables educational institutions to deal with unexpected events and crises that might have an impact on the safety of students and staff both on and off-campus. With a sophisticated messaging backbone and dynamic routing and alerts, OCA ensures email, sms, fax and voice messages get to the right people at the right time.

OCA Incident Manager does all of this and more, helping educational institutions track and manage logs, reports and related tasks, and providing strategic overviews of incidents, stakeholders and key assets.

OCA helps

• Manage two-way information flow with on-staff first responders and emergency officials
• Rapidly target communications using different attributes such as geographic location (buildings, lecture theatres, self-defined boundaries or classrooms) or contacts groups (students, faculty, department, course, class or location)
• Manage communications related to key assets (separate campuses, buildings, or even laboratory equipment) and the asset interdependencies, such that if one asset is impacted in an incident, the asset custodians of another will be alerted
• Protect the safety of students and staff in the case of an unexpected event or security breach, and provide updated policies or travel advice to staff working abroad
• Pre-plan for different types of crises and automate responses using workflows, saving time and freeing up staff for more value-added activities
• Efficiently and securely release information such as exam results, student reminders, changes to timetables or exam locations
• Reduce administrative overheads using the OCA contact "health check", making sure you have the right details for students and faculty when contact is critical

Click here to download our brochure for Education.