Disaster Outreach Program

Vanderbilt University faculty, staff and students who live off campus may receive a notification after a disaster has occurred off campus. Several factors will be evaluated to initiate a notification, such as incident type (i.e., natural disasters like major floods or tornados or human-made incidents like terrorist attacks or environmental accidents), location of impact and level of impact to university community members.

The disaster outreach notification may be sent up to 48 hours after a disaster has occurred. This notification is NOT for an imminent life safety alert and is separate from AlertVU.

Individuals who work and learn at Vanderbilt University and live off campus in the affected community area may receive notifications in the event of an incident. These individuals include:

• Off-campus undergraduate students
• Graduate students
• Professional students
• Postdoctoral students
• Faculty
• Staff

Undergraduate students living on campus will not receive notifications. Vanderbilt University Medical Center employees are similarly not included in the program and will not receive notifications.

The incident must be in the primary area of Middle Tennessee, which includes Davidson County and surrounding counties, or the secondary area which includes southern Kentucky, northern Alabama, northwest Georgia and northeast Mississippi.

Incidents occurring beyond the primary and secondary areas may necessitate that the Office of Emergency Management initiates the communications protocol to affected Vanderbilt community members and will be assessed on a case-by-case basis by university leaders.

The delivery methods you have indicated for AlertVU emergency notifications will be used for the incident outreach notifications. All individuals will be contacted at their Vanderbilt email address; individuals who provide their phone numbers and sign up to be contacted by SMS text will also receive text message(s).

To learn how to update your contact information, please visit the AlertVU website. Students can update their contact information in the YES system, and faculty and staff can update their information in the Oracle system. Please note that if you opt out of AlertVU messages, you are also opting out of receiving VDOP (disaster outreach) notifications.

It is important to review and make sure your address in the YES (for students) or Oracle Cloud (for faculty and staff) system is up to date. Your address in these systems will be used to determine whether you are living in an area affected by a community incident and may receive VDOP notifications.

Students: Students can update their address using the YES system. Detailed instructions can be found in the Update Contact Information user guide.

Faculty and Staff: Faculty and staff can update their address using the Oracle Cloud system. Once logged into Oracle using single sign-on, click the Personal Information tile, then click Contact Info and navigate to the Address section to update your home address.

AlertVU is Vanderbilt’s mass emergency notification system, which is designed to alert Vanderbilt students, faculty and staff in an emergency that poses an imminent, ongoing threat or danger to the campus community. 

VDOP notifications are used for off-campus, post-incident communications with potentially affected community members in the event of a community disaster. They are intended to determine whether university community members have been affected by an incident, and if so, connect them with resources in the event they need assistance.

While AlertVU is designed to inform you of an imminent threat and to take action immediately, VDOP notifications may be initiated up to 48 hours after an incident has occurred.

Several incidents, such as natural disasters, have occurred in the Middle Tennessee and surrounding region and have affected members of the university community. The university would like to have a better understanding of those touched by future events and connect them with various incident recovery resources.

In the event of a community disaster or incident, Vanderbilt’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) will collect data through the Everbridge notification system that will be shared with appropriate executive leadership to determine whether disaster outreach notifications should be sent to potentially affected Vanderbilt employees and students. The data received through the Everbridge system from the notifications will be held in the system and accessed by trained OEM staff. High level data from the notifications will be shared with the Human Resources Consulting team to close the loop with the supervisors and operational teams who may be impacted by employee absences following an incident.