Case Study: Macquarie University achieves enhanced campus safety and crisis-ready communications with BlackBerry AtHoc

Macquarie University Protects its People Through Better Crisis Communication

Macquarie University, a large international campus in Australia with about 40,000 students and 5,000 staff, needed to strengthen its duty of care by fixing critical communication gaps. Located near shopping precincts, heavy-traffic roads and bushfire-prone national parks and hosting diverse facilities (labs, hospital, corporate offices), the university found email and radio insufficient for large-scale, multi-stakeholder emergencies and required a secure, privacy‑compliant, easy-to-use system that could reach people on any device 24/7.

Macquarie deployed BlackBerry AtHoc in the cloud as a multimodal crisis-communication platform integrated with social channels, RSS, desktop notifications, SMS, phone, email and a mobile app (with a duress button), plus SSO, two-way messaging, geolocation and audit templates. The result is faster, coordinated responses and clearer outreach to students, staff, partners and first responders—demonstrated when AtHoc was used to manage a major campus plumbing flood—while providing scalable, secure, and easily maintained crisis readiness.

Macquarie University

John Durbridge

Campus Security Manager, Property