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A recent debate about when to report children missing from school highlights the varied uses for auto dialing software.

A discussion broke out last month in Oregon City, Oregon, after a child went missing from school: Why was the parent notified only after 5 p.m. when the child had been missing all day?

It was a good debate because as a mother myself, I can tell you that sitting on that crucial information all day is just not cool.

But I’m not going to write about when schools should report missing children. I want to talk about another topic that the discussion raised: the role that auto dialers can play in serving breaking news and announcements.

We live in a sea of data and push notifications. Clearing our inboxes is something that only the determined among us can achieve. Yet, phone calls continue to draw our attention above and beyond other communication technologies, which makes them quite useful for emergency notifications and other announcements.

Auto dialers help organizations, public or private, create automated communications using this powerful medium that is the telephone.

With an auto dialer, it is possible to tap into a database and give a particular person a call if certain criteria have been met—such as a child going missing, or a customer who purchased a recalled product.

The calls can be completely automated, too, pulling information from a database to customize a pre-defined script. This can be useful for things like appointment reminders, or even services where phone notifications are a selling point (such as fraud detection alerts).

There are a multitude of applications for being able to automatically call someone with a customized message when certain criteria have been met.

I’ll leave such applications to the imagination of the reader. But the point is that auto dialers are a valuable tool that far too many businesses underutilize.

The school system in Oregon was getting flack for not having its system call faster. This was a request for more auto dialing, and it certainly is something the school system could put into place.