The Citadel
Mass Notification
The Citadel, a state-supported senior military college in Charleston, uses Bulldog Alert, a two-way mobile-app-plus-mass-communications system, to issue both Clery emergency notifications and timely warnings; per the Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, Timely Warning Notices are written and distributed by the Director or Deputy Director of Public Safety and Force Protection (PSAF) and are routinely reviewed by the Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and/or Vice President for Communications and Marketing before distribution.
Read the official policyInstitution
The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina
Military · SC
~3,700 studentsBulldog Alert
In the policy’s own words
What the policy says
Bulldog Alert system descriptionverbatim
Bulldog Alert is The Citadel's multifunctional campus safety notification system that facilitates easy and instantaneous, two-way communications during a crisis or emergency situation.
- This exact sentence recurred identically across independent search queries of The Citadel's Bulldog Alert pages, describing the system as explicitly two-way rather than one-way broadcast.
Timely Warning Notice issuance and review chainverbatim
Timely Warning Notices are generally written and distributed to the campus community by the Director of PSAF, Deputy Director of PSAF or their designee, and they are routinely reviewed and approved by the Senior Vice President, General Counsel and/or Vice President for Communications and Marketing prior to distribution.
- This decision chain recurred consistently across independent search queries of the Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, naming both an issuing office (PSAF leadership) and a review/approval layer (Senior Vice President, General Counsel, or VP for Communications and Marketing).
Automatic email registrationnot yet verified against the source
The policy addresses this topic; its exact wording has not yet been verified against the source, so no text is quoted here. Open the official policy to read it.
The Citadel, What is BulldogAlert? How do I sign up? page (host blocked automated fetch; text from search index)Emergency notification versus timely warningnot yet verified against the source
The policy addresses this topic; its exact wording has not yet been verified against the source, so no text is quoted here. Open the official policy to read it.
The Citadel Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, 2022-2023 (host blocked automated fetch; text from search index)At a glance
How this policy works
- When it activates
- Bulldog Alert is used for crisis or emergency situations broadly; The Citadel draws the standard Clery split between timely warnings (a Clery-geography crime judged a serious or continuing threat) and emergency notifications (broader, including weather and medical emergencies).
- Who decides
- Timely Warning Notices are written and distributed by the Director of PSAF, the Deputy Director of PSAF, or their designee, and are routinely reviewed and approved by the Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and/or Vice President for Communications and Marketing prior to distribution; the Director or Deputy Director may issue a notice without that consultation if immediate distribution is warranted, and named backups (Senior Vice President, General Counsel, or Vice President for Communications and Marketing) can write and distribute the notice if PSAF leadership is unavailable or directly involved in the incident.
- Timeliness standard
- A specific minutes-based timeliness standard was not found in the public sources reviewed; the Annual Security and Fire Safety Report frames Timely Warning Notices as distributed once PSAF, in consultation with responsible authorities when time permits, judges a serious or continuing threat exists.
- Emergency notification vs. timely warning
- The Citadel distinguishes timely warnings, tied to certain criminal actions representing a serious or ongoing threat within Citadel Clery Geography, from emergency notifications, which are broader and can cover both criminal and non-criminal significant incidents such as weather and medical emergencies.
- Testing cadence
- A published Bulldog Alert-specific testing schedule was not found in the public sources reviewed.
- Scope & limits
- All citadel.edu email accounts are automatically registered for Bulldog Alert emails; text and telephone/cell-phone delivery depend on contact information kept current through the PAWS and WISE registration systems, and the mobile app's location-sharing feature is active only when the emergency function is triggered on campus.
ChannelsSmsEmailPhone CallPush NotificationWebsite
Analysis
Reading the policy
The Citadel describes Bulldog Alert as its multifunctional campus safety notification system, built to facilitate easy and instantaneous, two-way communications during a crisis or emergency situation, a description that emphasizes both outbound alerting and inbound reporting rather than one-way broadcast alone. The system is delivered through three components: a free mobile application for Apple and Android devices, mass-communications links via email and text, and a desktop application installed on Citadel classroom and office computers; both the mobile and desktop apps can also function as panic buttons to instantly summon Public Safety help, and the mobile app supports anonymous tips with text, photos, and video plus two-way chat.
Enrollment is largely automatic for the email channel: The Citadel's Department of Public Safety states that all campus users with citadel.edu email accounts are automatically registered for Bulldog Alert emails, while students, faculty, and staff separately update phone numbers and addresses through the PAWS and WISE campus registration systems, and subscribers can elect text, email, and telephone/cell-phone delivery. This auto-enrollment-for-email-plus-opt-in-for-phone model is a hybrid pattern seen at several institutions in this archive.
On decision authority, The Citadel's 2022-2023 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report lays out an unusually explicit chain: Timely Warning Notices are generally written and distributed to the campus community by the Director of PSAF, the Deputy Director of PSAF, or their designee, and are routinely reviewed and approved by the Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and/or Vice President for Communications and Marketing prior to distribution, though the Director or Deputy Director retains authority to issue a notice without that consultation when immediate distribution is warranted. If the Director and Deputy Director are themselves directly involved in or impacted by an incident, or otherwise unavailable, the Senior Vice President, General Counsel, or Vice President for Communications and Marketing can write and distribute the notice directly, a documented succession plan for who can activate Bulldog Alert if the primary decision-makers are unreachable.
The Citadel's public safety materials also draw the standard Clery distinction: timely warnings address certain criminal actions representing a serious or ongoing threat to the campus community, while emergency notifications are broader and may address both criminal actions and other significant incidents or emergencies such as weather and medical emergencies, with Timely Warning Notices primarily distributed through the Bulldog Alert system's text/voice, landline, and blast-email channels.
Because citadel.edu returns HTTP 403 to automated fetching in this environment, the excerpts below were reconstructed from official Citadel Bulldog Alert and Public Safety page text, and from the Institute's Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, as reproduced in search-engine indexing and corroborated across multiple independent queries, and are marked accordingly.
Takeaways
Key findings
Bulldog Alert is explicitly built for two-way communication (panic-button and anonymous-tip features), not just outbound broadcast, delivered via a mobile app, desktop app, email, and text.
citadel.edu email accounts are automatically enrolled for Bulldog Alert emails; phone and text delivery depend on contact information kept current in PAWS and WISE.
The Citadel's Timely Warning Notice chain names both an issuing office (Director or Deputy Director of PSAF) and a review/approval layer (Senior Vice President, General Counsel, or VP for Communications and Marketing), with a documented succession plan if PSAF leadership is unavailable.
The Citadel, a state-chartered senior military college, is fully Clery-covered and draws the standard timely-warning/emergency-notification distinction in its Annual Security and Fire Safety Report.
Provenance
Sources
- Official
- Official
- Clery ASR
- Official
Tags
policyemergency-notificationtimely-warningclery-actmilitarysenior-military-collegebulldog-alertsouth-carolina
Added 2026-07-03Updated 2026-07-03Via ingestion