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Mass Communication Technology
7 Best Practices for Emergency Notification
8/1/2007
"And the public relations office sends that information out to media. Then one of two things happens: Folks at Student Affairs, Government Affairs, and Alumni offices take those communiqués and manually adapt them to respective audiences. Or, the campus PR office sends its communiqué out and it's immediately sent out verbatim [by those other groups] to those constituent groups." In the first case, she says, there's a lot of time wasted by people adapting the message for their particular audiences. In the second case, there's an assumption that one type of communication will fit all. In either case, there's no feedback loop—it's "one way" only.In the case of the Texas A&M tragedy, she says, her team was getting questions from the media, which it posted to the web. Based on those queries, each VP put out information for his or her constituent group. When a question came up from one of those groups, that VP would get on the phone to Lawson for more information. That kind of process "becomes cumbersome and difficult to handle," says Lawson, who recalls that after the A&M tragedy, 300 members of the media were on site. "I have no idea how many Virginia Tech had, but I would guess at least that many," she offers. Handling such a tragedy quickly becomes "a logistical nightmare," she explains. But planning ahead, and practicing, practicing, practicing, can make all the difference.
IN THE AFTERMATH of Texas A&M's bonfire collapse, the university empowered one experienced individual to get the word out—resulting in timely, ongoing communications throughout the ordeal.
3) Expect to Make Decisions Based on Incomplete Information
Last year, WWU put its public safety officers through an "active shooter scenario, so they'd have some understanding of what might happen in a case like that," says John Lawson. The CIO maintains that the scenario helped participants understand what their roles would be in an emergency, and what the most appropriate mode of communication would be for any given crisis. His role as CIO, he says, is "to help coordinate the technology piece of that, and then participate as a member of the emergency team, thinking carefully about emergencies and what our response would be." But Lawson sees additional benefits of practicing for a crisis: "Conducting these exercises helps you understand that you won't have all the information you'll need to make a perfect decision," he says.
He believes that the administrators who made decisions at Virginia Tech did extremely well, given the situation they found themselves in.
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