About
Calmessages has been the campus's official web-based broadcast messaging system, providing email notifications to faculty, staff and students. Since 1995, the system has provided a means for the chancellor, the executive vice chancellor and provost, and other authorized leaders to send announcements to everyone in the campus community who has an email address in the CalNet Directory. It is used to electronically distribute campus administrative memos and to notify of updates to campus delegations and policies, records management, and various other University business functions.
The original CALmessages platform was built here at UC Berkeley and was state of the art at the time. During the many years it has been in use, there have been significant advancements in mass messaging systems. CALmessages has not kept up with many of those changes, leaving campus with limited functionality.
In 2023, Public Affairs began a project to replace the original CALmessages system to give leadership a better tool to communicate with the community. This led to a product called Broadcast, created by a vendor out of Cinncinati - Cerkl. The Public Affairs team worked throughout 2024 with partners across campus to get the new tool up and running. It will launch in a phased approach in early 2025.
Timeline
The timeline for the project is as follows:
- January 2025: Pilot program with a small group of administrators to specific, targeted audiences
- Spring semester 2025: Increase administrators and expand lists to larger audiences in new system
- Summer 2025: Fully transition all official campus messages to new Calmessage platform
There will be a period of time where individuals and groups will be receiving emails from both the new and old Calmessage systems. As the timeline progresses, more and more official emails will come from the new system. They will look different and have new functionality.
What this means for campus
The implementation of the new platform, still named Calmessages, will require no action from the majority of the campus community. The administrators of the system have already been contacted and are part of the process.
For the rest of campus, there will be changes in the look and functionality of emails. Instead of coming from CALmessages@berkeley.edu, emails will come from communications@berkeley.edu. They will include images and other types of media, along with improved branding and formatting. All emails from the improved Calmessage system provide analytics, so administrators within the system will be able to track how effective the messaging is.
Below is an example of a current CALmessage, and what a potential future Calmessage could look like instead.
This is an example of what a new Calmessage could look like.
This is what the original CALmessage looked like.