With the School Year in Full Gear, Schools across the Country are Using Connect-ED(R), Reaching an NTI Milestone for September

The NTI Group, Inc. (NTI) announced that on September 4, school administrators sent out 1,167,881 messages through the Connect-ED notification system, breaking NTI's record with the largest calling day for the month of September. With students and staff back in school, administrators and security personnel are using the service to communicate with parents and staff about important information and announcements, such as campus updates, security alerts and administrative and emergency preparedness notifications.

"In the last several months, NTI has been routinely reaching over one million phone numbers a day, which represents a 100 percent growth over this time last year," said Robin D. Richards, Chairman and CEO of NTI. "As the market leader in time-sensitive mass notifications for government organizations, we're seeing a rapid increase in demand as schools, cities, and government agencies quickly adopt technologies that allow them to impart important and timely messages to increase safety, organization and communication."

It is no surprise that the Connect-ED service is seeing daily call volumes in the millions and between 20 to 25 time-sensitive messages each month. A recent study by the Yankee Group found that demand for mass notification services is increasing and schools, cities and government organizations are willing to invest in technologies that have the ability to notify large-scale populations of important events, updates and alerts. And according to this study, demand for these services will increase significantly in the coming years.

NTI's Connect family of services is prepared to meet these growing demands and provide communications systems that support the various needs and expectations of the schools, cities and government organizations that use its services. As seen with the million call volume of the Connect-ED service, schools must have the ability to communicate with parents and staff through a system that can meet the demands of the various situations they may face.

With the Connect-ED service, school administrators can send messages in any language, at up to six phone numbers and two e-mail addresses to each student and staff member. Because the service requires no additional hardware, Connect-ED can be used from any computer with Internet access or telephone, ensuring that administrators can send vital messages from wherever they are located, even if they are evacuated in an emergency situation. To ensure that the message was sent successfully and accurately, officials receive reports listing which contacts did not receive the message, which provides them with the ability to follow up via alternative means as needed.

To ensure that important messages reach students and staff quickly no matter what their preferred method of communication is, the Connect-ED system sends voice and text messages through four different modes of communication:

  -- Voice messages to home phones, work phones, cell phones, and even
     e-mails
  -- Text messages to cell phones, PDAs and other text-based devices
  -- Written messages to e-mail accounts
  -- Messages to TTY/TDD receiving devices for the hearing impaired

About The NTI Group

The NTI Group, Inc. (NTI), a Delaware corporation, is a privately held company that provides award winning communication systems designed specifically for local, regional, state, and Federal government entities. The Connect family of services enables rapid dissemination of critical information via voice and text devices using its premier mass notification engine designed to allow users to quickly and easily record and send time-based notifications to thousands of people in minutes using just a telephone. NTI makes and distributes the Connect-ED(R), Connect-CTY(R), Connect-GOV(R), and Connect-MIL(R) systems, allowing users to target specific groups and/or geographic regions within their database(s) and engage recipients in two-way communication by asking them to respond to questions via their telephone keypads.

Source: The NTI Group, Inc.