Making Sure Your Campus Safety App Awareness Campaign is Successful
Looking to upgrade safety on your college campus? A campus safety app for students, staff, faculty and visitors may be on your list of potential safety solutions for your community. If so, it’s important to understand the full scope of campus safety app awareness. Reliability, multi-functionality, and usability are all very important factors to consider when looking at different safety app products, but perhaps less obvious is the level of awareness of the app within your campus community. An app that functions perfectly will ultimately be rendered useless if the community its supposed to protect is unaware of its existence.
So how can you make sure that a company with a safety app product will help you raise awareness after launch?
We’ve come up with a few specific questions to ask that will give you a better understanding of the community awareness plan in place for each company you speak to.
Question 1: Is there an additional fee for acquiring marketing materials or assistance for campus safety app awareness?
Some companies might quote for a safety app that does not include marketing assistance after the app’s roll out. This can quickly lead to a lack of awareness and may have devastating effects, as the once perceived practical and technically sound safety product that was going to help protect people on campus… now has very little, if any traction within the community, rendering the safety app nearly useless.
The safety app awareness challenge can be a bit of a domino effect… the more who know about it, the faster the awareness spreads. The initial people in the know will act as ‘champions’ of the product (it’s fresh in their mind) and will be more likely to say something about the safety app to others.
Question 2: Is White Labelling a possibility?
A White Labelled safety app is simply a custom app that is unique to a college or university. Having the option to White Label a safety app is very important for campus community outreach. A White Labelled safety app will have a unique name, colors, logos, icons and even potentially configuration that can be decided by the college or university. This unique branding helps students identify with the safety app, and it’s far more likely they will trust the app and download it without a second thought if the brand is familiar to them.
Question 3: Can you provide references? (Ask references about community engagement assistance provided)
Kind of an obvious question, but if you decide to reach out to other clients of the company you’re considering, ask them about how the company supports community awareness. Download rates are a particular statistic you could ask for to get an idea of what percentage of the student population is aware of the app. Just be mindful that download rates only measure the quantity of downloads and not how often the safety app is utilized.
These are just a few specific questions that could be asked to better identify what plan a company has in place to help you spread awareness of your safety app on campus. Being aware of the challenges surrounding this issue will help you narrow the field and pick the company that works best for your needs.
The CampusShield safety app is a prime example of an app backed by a plan to engage community awareness. The CampusShield safety app utilizes emergency functionality that can locate an emergency caller down to the floor and room number and also allows users to submit tips anonymously to safety forces who can then start a conversation back with the tip submitter. All this comes with a plan and marketing assistance to help you engage your campus community and thoroughly spread awareness.
Learn more about CampusShield and its campus safety app awareness initiatives.
