Emergency Notification Systems (ENS) represents a branch of a growing sub-area of Business Information Systems related to decision support for emergencies in organizations. The focus of this paper is on user perceptions of emergency notification systems for improving the management of their use, a topic that is studied in very few publications. None of them explores user perceptions of ENS over time for providing insights on improving their management. The paper presents findings from a longitudinal study of students’ usage of the Emergency Notification System (ENS) at a Northeast US university in 2011 and 2019. Though the same subjects were not available for the 2019 survey, the responders were drawn from the same demographic pool as the 2011 study since the characteristics of the student population have not changed.

The paper explores research questions that are relevant to any organization:

• Is there an improvement in the user attitude towards the university ENS in 2019 compared to 2011?
• What type of information is perceived as relevant by the users of the ENS in 2011 and 2019?
• What training is provided to the users of ENS in 2011 and 2019 and what are the opportunities for improvement?

The statistical results were based on a sample of 61 surveys in 2011 and 97 responses collected in 2019. They show possibilities to identify more ways to engage the students in better training about the ENS and increase its effectiveness. The paper discusses also the limitations of the research and directions for future work.