Visitor Aware: Secure K-12 School Visitor and Volunteer Management

Joanna Haugland, Partner and Director of Sales & Marketing

With active aggressor and school violence incidents occurring more frequently across the U.S., being a parent, in this day and age, is rather stressful. School safety has been in the national spotlight in the last few years, drawing attention to the fact that schools need to be prepared for any potential situation. With the increasing number of such disturbing events, school administrators and parents are desperately seeking answers for improving the safety and security of children, faculty, and staff. Bennett Stone was one such concerned parent who was worried about the safety of his daughter—a fourth-grade student who recently joined a new school. While visiting her for lunch, he noticed that the school had a rather inefficient pen and paper-based visitor management model in place. To help the school enforce proper security measures, he began to search for a cost-efficient and reliable visitor management solution to recommend for implementation. However, he soon realized that the solutions available on the market were not budget-friendly and did not meet their school requirements.

Being a lifelong programmer, Stone decided to build a user-friendly and reliable visitor management system, which would protect the most valuable asset and future of the world—its children.

Our aim is to be the one-stop-shop providing a reasonable all-inclusive yearly subscription that includes visitor and volunteer management as well as emergency management

In 2018, he founded Visitor Aware—a software as a service company that currently offers visitor, volunteer, student, and emergency management through two mobile applications and an online administration dashboard that requires no proprietary hardware. They are also about to release an anonymous tip line feature to increase their already robust product offering. “Visitor Aware is our visitor and volunteer management software, whereas Watchdog is a separate all-inclusive emergency management application. Our services are designed for K-12 schools and daycares such as private schools, charter schools, and public schools, alongside other privileged access locations that need to utilize effective visitor management and monitoring procedures,” says Stone, the founder and CTO of Visitor Aware.

Visitor Aware provides an enhanced layer of security while maintaining ease of use and compliance by automatically and effectively screening visitors in seconds against government watch-lists, the National Sex Offender Registry, injunctions or other legal issues, and custom banned visitor lists. It also utilizes facial recognition technology to eliminate false positives during the screening process. As part of their default security checks, every visitor entering a school is required to scan his/her government-issued identification card with the Visitor Aware Kiosk application. If no red flags are raised, the visitor is given a high visibility badge and allowed to check into the facility.

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Company
Visitor Aware

Headquarters
Mesa, AZ

Management
Joanna Haugland, Partner and Director of Sales & Marketing and Bennett Stone, Founder and CTO

Description
Visitor Aware is a software as a service company that currently offers visitor, volunteer, student, and emergency management through two mobile applications and an online administration dashboard that manages both of these applications. Visitor Aware is a visitor management and screening service, whereas Watchdog is a separate all-inclusive emergency management application. The company's services are designed for K-12 schools and daycares such as private schools, charter schools, and public schools, alongside other privileged access locations that need to utilize effective visitor management and monitoring procedures