Should a crisis hit the University of Montana, students sitting in classrooms will get immediate emergency information, even if their mobile phones are turned off and they aren't online. Classrooms, dorms, and other buildings are now outfitted with LED message boards--a sort of wall-mounted electronic pager--that use widely understood colors of red, yellow, and green to convey just how bad a situation might be. The system, installed in the summer of 2008 and successfully tested in more than 65 location on the campus the past winter, does not depend upon the reliability of any outside cellular phone networks and doesn't require students to have ready access to their text-messaging devices. The simplicity of the University of Montana system reflects a sea change in the way crisis communications are being handled on campuses today. Two years after the shooting tragedy at Virginia Tech focused attention on emergency response and prompted massive expenditures on the latest instant-messaging technology, most campuses are also hedging their bets on more fundamental ways of keeping the people on their campuses informed and safe. In this article, the author discusses how crisis communications has changed in the past two years.