University Crisis Communications
As a Virginia Tech alum and uncle to a current student, yesterday’s news was very sad and upsetting. Undoubtedly, the university leadership will come under increasing pressure about their failure to communicate the danger to students in a timely fashion.
A Washington Post story helped explain the challenges facing the university: “Virginia Tech was aware of the challenges involved in reaching students during a crisis, even during an age when it seems that everyone is wired. In August, on the first day of classes, an inmate escaped from jail, fatally shot a hospital guard and a sheriff’s deputy and then hid on campus, setting off a manhunt that shut down college grounds. The university posted updates on its Web site that day and sent out e-mails, but it took longer for the news to reach students who were commuting to school and were not online.”
This isn’t a unique challenge, and reading the stories pouring out of Blacksburg, sadly, reminded me of a case study from my forthcoming book.
The good news is that mobility can potentially help avoid these types of tragedies in the future.
Montclair State University is the second largest, and fastest growing university in New Jersey. Like Virginia Tech and other universities, Montclair faced challenges communicating with students, many of whom commute from all around the New York City metro area.
Back in ancient history when I attended Virginia Tech, all dorm rooms had a telephone and all students anxiously checked their mail everyday. Today, at many universities, students “uninstall” their dorm room phones to make more room for posters (who needs a phone nailed to a wall when we all have cellphones?), paper mail goes ignored for weeks, and students choose webmail services over university provided accounts with limited storage. In this environment, how can a university possibly get an urgent message reliably out to all students, faculty, and staff?
Montclair’s solution is to provide everyone with a school-issued cellphone with special communications capabilities built in. Most students port their existing cellphone number to the new phone, but the university is able to maintain very accurate records of everyone’s numbers - making it easy to immediately get messages out as a phone call, a text message, or an e-mail directly to the student’s pocket.
The university worked with Sprint Nextel to ensure great coverage everywhere on campus and worked with Rave Wireless to implement applications on the phones that are particularly well suited to the campus environment. Those applications address the academic, social, and safety opportunities that exist on any campus. The implementation wasn’t without challenges - most notably, how do you drive adoption when most students show up with a phone they already know and love. You can read all about it when the book comes out.
But for now, we’re left stunned and praying that those suffering personal losses can know “the peace that passes understanding.”