WSU
Code Purple Emergency Notification System
Weber State University communicates campus emergencies through Code Purple, a text, voice, and email notification system reserved for campus public safety officials to use during an emergency or to announce a closure, delay, or significant disruption to normal operations, with students, faculty, and staff enrolling up to seven phone numbers and two email addresses through their eWeber account.
Read the official policyInstitution
Weber State University
Public Masters · UT
~32,701 studentsCode Purple
In the policy’s own words
What the policy says
What Code Purple isverbatim
Code Purple is an emergency notification system that gives Weber State University the ability to communicate health and safety emergency information quickly by text, voice and email message.
- Defines Code Purple as a combined text/voice/email system dedicated to health-and-safety emergency communication.
Scope of useverbatim
Code Purple will only be used by campus public safety officials during an emergency, or to announce an unexpected school closure or significant disruption to normal operations, such as a weather-related closure.
- Restricts Code Purple activation to campus public safety officials and to a defined set of trigger events: emergencies, closures, delays, and significant operational disruptions.
Contact registration ceilingverbatim
Code Purple allows seven phone numbers and two email addresses per account.
- Documents an unusually high per-account contact ceiling (seven phones, two emails) reached through the eWeber single sign-on portal.
At a glance
How this policy works
- When it activates
- Code Purple will only be used by campus public safety officials during an emergency, or to announce an unexpected school closure or significant disruption to normal operations, such as a weather-related closure.
- Who decides
- Decision authority rests with campus public safety officials, who are the only users authorized to activate Code Purple. A specific named title (e.g., Chief of Police or a designated Clery Compliance Officer) was not confirmed verbatim in the sources reviewed.
- Timeliness standard
- Code Purple is built to communicate health and safety emergency information quickly by text, voice, and email; a specific minutes-based delivery SLA was not reproduced verbatim in the public sources reviewed.
- Emergency notification vs. timely warning
- Weber State frames Code Purple around the Clery emergency-notification standard implicitly, through its 'immediate threat' emergency-use language and its separate, plain-language description of lockdown and shelter-in-place message types; a specific timely-warning-versus-emergency-notification split, as some peer institutions publish explicitly, was not found verbatim.
- Testing cadence
- The system is tested approximately once or twice a year by sending a test message to enrolled contacts.
- Scope & limits
- Code Purple is reserved for genuine emergencies and closure/delay/disruption announcements, not routine campus news; enrollment covers up to seven phone numbers and two email addresses per eWeber account, so reach depends on how many contacts a given user has registered.
ChannelsSmsPhone CallEmailWebsite
Analysis
Reading the policy
Weber State University (Ogden, Utah) runs its emergency communications through Code Purple, described on the university's dedicated Code Purple page as an emergency notification system that gives the university the ability to communicate health and safety emergency information quickly by text, voice, and email message. The system is explicitly scoped: Code Purple is used only by campus public safety officials during an emergency, or to announce an unexpected school closure or significant disruption to normal operations, such as a weather-related closure, distinguishing genuine emergency use from routine campus communication.
Registration runs through the university's single sign-on portal. Students, faculty, and staff sign up for Code Purple through their eWeber account, which allows up to seven phone numbers and two email addresses per account, a notably generous contact ceiling compared to most peer institutions' two- or three-number caps; account holders can review, update, and add contact information at any time by logging back into the eWeber portal. A companion WSU Code Purple mobile app extends the same alerting to smartphones with additional safety features.
Weber State also publishes a plain-language guide to what each alert type means for the reader: a lockdown message instructs recipients (in the event of a hostile or armed intruder) to run away if possible, or otherwise to go to a room that can be locked or barricaded, close blinds, turn off lights, spread out and hide, silence phones, and be ready to fight if necessary, explicitly not leaving until an all-clear message is received; a shelter-in-place message is issued for severe weather or a hazardous-material spill. The university states the system is tested roughly once or twice a year by sending a test message, a lower-frequency cadence than the several-times-per-semester testing some larger systems advertise.
Because weber.edu hosts return HTTP 403 to automated fetching in this environment, the language above was captured from the Code Purple and About Code Purple pages as reproduced identically across multiple independent search queries, which is the basis for treating it as verbatim; the named decision-authority chain beyond "campus public safety officials" (e.g., a specific title such as Chief of Police or Clery Compliance Officer) was not confirmed word-for-word and is left general rather than asserted.
Takeaways
Key findings
Code Purple is Weber State's text/voice/email emergency notification system, restricted to use by campus public safety officials for genuine emergencies and closure/delay/disruption announcements.
Registration happens through the eWeber single sign-on portal and allows up to seven phone numbers and two email addresses per account, a high ceiling relative to peer systems.
A companion WSU Code Purple mobile app extends alerting to smartphones with additional safety features.
Weber State publishes plain-language guidance distinguishing lockdown messages (run, hide, or fight; wait for an explicit all-clear) from shelter-in-place messages (severe weather or a hazmat spill).
The system is tested roughly once or twice per year by sending a test message; a specific named decision-authority title beyond 'campus public safety officials' was not confirmed verbatim.
Policy, meet practice
When this system actually fired
1 documented time WSU’s alert system was used, from the case archive.
Provenance
Sources
- Official
- Official
- Official
- Official
- Student Paper
Tags
policyemergency-notificationtimely-warningclery-actcode-purplepublic-mastersutah
Added 2026-07-20Updated 2026-07-20Via ingestion