With cell phones as popular as they are today for communication, it’s clear it is the fastest way to contact someone, as nearly everyone carries one now days. Granted email, snail mail and facebook can work as a solid communication vice between groups, there are faster more efficient ways of interaction. NetworkText is one company that clearly understands this. NetworkText is a website that allows college groups to communicate with their members via text messaging for free. The company was launched back in September and all the employees are current college students.
This is the perfect service for any athletic team, fraternity/sorority, organization or club giving them the ability to send out text messages to all their group members at the same time, for free. Basically, it’s for any administrator or leader who needs to get out a quick message to all team members. This ensures all individuals will be notified in real time; much easier than having to call all members of the group.
To send out a text message to a group, the group administrator can go online or if they aren’t by their computer they can text message into the website and have their message bounced back to the entire group. The service is offered for free, although a brief advertisement is attached at the end of each text message.
With more then a million text messages sent per month, most of the current users use the service to announce group meetings, party announcements, homework and project reminders and sports scheduling. They also have a related facebook application as well which allows friends to send text messages from their facebook profile.
The use of mass group text messaging has been considered by many College administrators nationwide, mainly as an additional security measure after the Virginia Tech incident. I asked Derek Johnson, NetworkText CEO, about his comments on Colleges implementing a massive text message system for students:
I am a strong believer in that all college campuses should implement an emergency alert system. I think text messaging is a great tool to get out information to a large group, but I think that schools have put too many of their eggs into one basket and they need to diversify and make sure they aren't focusing on one type of communication such as text messaging. To really reach such a large and diverse group as a college student body, a university must use many different communication methods to make a system that is effective in an emergency type situation.
While NetworkText may or may not be a wide scale solution, it has found its niche providing College clubs and groups with a very handy tool for fast mass communication. Being a free service, it’s perfect for any College budget.
