This article describes how a growing number of community colleges have begun deploying emergency alert systems that can be used to send information via e-mail and text messaging directly to students' cell phones and other portable devices. Such systems enable authorized campus administrators to send messages to thousands of people within minutes. Systems typically allow messages to be sent to a variety of text communication devices--mobile phones, e-mail accounts, RSS readers, and wireless PDAs--regardless of which communications carrier a subscriber uses. When evaluating and selecting emergency alert systems and services, it's important to consider factors such as which types of devices they support, how easy they are to deploy, and how many devices they can reach.