The Campus Emergency Business Boom

Feb. 15, 2008 — -- Gregory Bender doesn't like to think that he profits from tragedy, but he concedes that when violence occurs on school and college campuses, his business spikes.

"After the Virginia Tech and Amish school shootings, business, unfortunately, took off," he said.

Bender is the chief executive officer of K12 Alerts, a White Plains, N.Y., company that provides electronic emergency notification systems to public and private schools and, most recently, colleges.

After Thursday's fatal shootings at Northern Illinois University, Bender and his competitors are bracing for a fresh round of inquiries from education officials eager to beef up their emergency systems with text messaging, e-mail, automated phone calls and other services.

NIU notified students of the shooting through e-mails, voice-mail alerts and a message on its Web site, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. It wasn't clear this morning whether the university used an internal system or an outside service.

"After Virginia Tech, almost 10 months later, the interest had slowed down a bit," said Ara Bagdasarian, the chief operating officer of e2Campus, a Leesburg, Va., company that works with college and universities nationwide. "I do think this will definitely elevate the awareness of campus communications once again."

If it does, Bagdasarian will find himself competing with as many as 50 other emergency alert companies. It wasn't always that way.

When e2Campus was established in 2003, Bagdasarian said, competition was virtually nonexistent. But demand wasn't as great either. By 2004, just two colleges had signed for the company's services. By the early spring of 2005, e2Campus had 30 clients.

And then came Virginia Tech: In April 2007, a gunman killed 31 people on the campus of the Blacksburg, Va., university before killing himself.

In the time since the tragedy, Bagdasarian saw his client list grow to nearly 500, most of them colleges. In October, the University of Memphis used e2Campus text messaging to reach students after the murder of a college football player. The University of New Mexico used e2Campus to evacuate students after a chlorine gas leak.

"It was overwhelming, the amount of demand for the service with phone calls and online requests," he said. To handle it all, Bagdasarian increased the size of his staff fivefold, to almost 50 employees. He also expanded the company's infrastructure with servers in New York, California, Florida, Texas and Washington state.