Honors Society Increases Campus Safety App Downloads

Illinois Central College students may be safer on campus thanks to increased student downloads of the Rave Guardian campus safety app after a campaign by the Phi Theta Kappa honors society last fall.

Rave Guardian is a free-to-download app available to students, faculty, and staff that functions as a campus safety app as well as a resource guide. Users can call campus police, find website links, access a phone directory, and even submit anonymous tips.

Since its introduction in 2018, campus police and HR have tried to get staff and students to download the app. New staff are always provided with a flyer encouraging them to download it, and campus housing residents get a packet that mentions the app when they first move in.

According to campus police statistics, it has been used for 58 chats/calls as of Dec. 5, 2023, most of which were noise complaints from campus housing. On the other hand, 3,999 direct calls to the campus police were made to campus police in 2022.

However, the ICC chapter for Phi Theta Kappa (PTK), an international community college honor society, was unsatisfied with only 8.8% of the total campus having the app downloaded in Spring 2023 and sought to increase its use in their Fall 2023 project. 

The idea for a Rave Guardian marketing project came from the PTK faculty advisors. “The Rave Guardian app was one of the most important aspects to college campus safety that had not been promoted heavily,” said Al Cuizon, president of PTK.

“We decided to do it the first week of the academic semester, the Welcome Week, and also before Welcome Week during the student orientation. So we committed to doing those three events. And then we also promoted it at the Student Activities Fair,” Cuizon said.

PTK had a table out during these events promoting the app. They offered a keychain with a rape whistle and flashlight to anyone who downloaded the app right there or could show that they had already downloaded it.

At one of the student fairs, this simple offer of free items convinced student Grace Parker to download the app. “I just wanted a rape whistle,” she said.

This project overall has led to an increase from 8.8% in Spring 2023 to 10.0% in Fall 2023 of the combined staff, faculty, and students having the app downloaded.

Rave Guardian is run by Rave, a campus safety company. They have been on campus since about 2013, and it is an “opt-out” system meaning everyone who works or goes to ICC is automatically put in the system.  

They run two sub-systems used on campus: Rave Alert and Rave Guardian.

“Rave Alert is a system where we go in and say ‘let’s send this message to everybody right now,’” says ICC Police Chief Erika Schwiderski.

This was recently experienced by the student body first-hand on the morning of Jan. 16, when many students woke up to the sound of their phones going off with calls, texts, and emails notifying them that the first day of classes was canceled and the campus was closed due to winter weather.

The system was re-activated for the same reason on Jan. 22, and once again for a delayed opening the following day.

Rave Guardian, however, is a newer 2018 system that is “opt-in”, meaning everyone has to go to the app store to download it. However, only ICC staff, faculty, and students are able to use it for ICC campus safety. Anyone who is not in these groups has to be manually added to Rave Alert.

This use of Rave Guardian’s technology seems to be slowly replacing one of the traditional campus safety tools: call boxes.

“A lot of campuses used to have the blue light poles from the 90s in walkways because nobody had cell phones and you didn’t have a quick way to call somebody if you needed help,” says Schwiderski.

However, the campus safety boxes have been removed over the last few years due to technical problems and an overall lack of use. This was highlighted in 2017-2018, right before they started to get out of order. “There were less than five uses in that time, and all were for non-emergencies,” she said.

“As those started failing, it was better for us to take those out. We didn’t want people thinking they could use them for them to not work right. We started taking those out, and bought the ones at housing because people are there 24/7 and may have visitors who don’t know to call us,” she said.

Three of these boxes can be found at campus housing. They are spaced evenly apart across the entire parking lot strip. Even though they are newer, they still have technical problems. Just recently one of them had an audio problem that made it unusable, although it is now fixed.

So campus police had to find a new, more reliable solution, which seemed to be the new feature-laden Rave Guardian app.

The constant availability of cell phones and the wide variety of the app’s abilities made it what Schwiderski considers to be a great tool for campus safety.

“It gives a lot more than just a button on a sidewalk,” says Schwiderski.

If you would like to download the Rave Guardian app, it is available for free on both iOS and Android and can be accessed by all current students, faculty, and staff.