Crisis Communication

It’s been 2 years.

I remember very clearly that day.

I only learned about the tragedy around 11AM that morning. I was unplugged to work on a project, and it’s just when I checked my email and the email listservs that I saw a message referring to something terrible going on at Virginia Tech. I checked VT website and decided to share the info and a screenshot with this blog’s readers right away.

There was no Twitter at that time, or more accurately it didn’t have the following it now has. I can’t stop thinking that if the microblogging platform had been around, maybe, some lives could have been saved.

The Virginia Tech Tragedy marked a day in American and higher ed history. That day, Mike Dame, Director of Web Communications at VT and his team wrote an important page in the higher ed web communication book. They literally wrote the manual to handle web communications in such a terrible crisis.

In the following day, they were criticized – as the institution was – mainly by mainstream media and experts for failing to communicate… But, at the end of the day, Mike and his team did a great work.

2 years ago, I kept track of the homepage changes on a post to compile an archive that could offer an account of the great work of Mike’s team.

When things settled down a bit, I told Mike that he should tell the community how things went and how his team handled them. I worked with Mike on a webinar (that allowed us to raise $4,300 for the Hokie Fund of Virginia Tech) that became a famous presentation given later that year at many higher ed conferences.

If you didn’t get a chance to watch that presentation yet, here’s your chance. Now that Mike has left higher education to work in healthcare, I think it’s time to release this presentation to our community for free.

From the Inside Out: Lessons Learned in Crisis Web Communications after the Virginia Tech Tragedy (69 minutes – recorded on July 10, 2007)
Michael Dame, Director of Web Communications at Virginia Tech, will provide an insider look and analysis of his institution’s Web communications after the tragedy, helping every institution understand what happened and prepare for the unthinkable and the unplanned.

Streaming file link
Downloading file link
You’ll need to use “hokie” as the password to get to these files and you might have to use Internet Explorer (sorry it’s an old file and Firefox doesn’t seem to play well with this version of WebEx recording)

You can also have a look at what I’ve written for the past 2 years about the VT Tragedy and the topic of crisis communication.

And, to honor the memory of the victims, why not tell us now what you’ve learned or have changed on your campus in terms of emergency notifications or security by posting a comment.

I’m currently working on my next column for University Business to be published in February 2009. This article will present 10 very practical tips to do more (or as well) with less (budget, people, time, etc), which explains why my main focus lately has been on the economic downturn and its consequences for higher education.

Even though economic crises can usually translate into positive outcomes (increased enrollment with many laid-off workers going back to college to upgrade their skill set), I have serious doubts about it in this specific case.

Didn’t the whole thing started with a financing meltdown?

The New York Times seems to agree with me today (not personally, but still) on this point in an article about a recently released report, article published today on its website: “College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.”

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the annual report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve all started to feel the pinch that is going to spread to our profession and industry. But, I’m wondering if you’ve already been asked to work on a similar type of the crisis communication website I stumbled upon this morning: Wesleyan’s “Securing The Future” website.

In the last update dated November 25, 2008 of this website launched in October, Wesleyan President Michael Roth even went on camera – in a short online video – to share an update about the current situation of the college budget and finances.

The website includes updates by the president, frequently asked questions and links to several posts Roth wrote about the topic on his blog, Roth on Wesleyan.

Have your top executives started to use the Web to communicate on this tough topic as well?
Do you think this is a good idea? Tell us by posting a comment.

After being away from this blog from some time – geez, almost 2 weeks, that’s what work can do to you sometimes – I’m back with a new edition of my “Catch-up Date with Karine” series.

Unless, you were leaving on an unconnected deserted island last week, you’ve probably heard about all the great things happening at the HighEdWeb conference in Springfield, MO last week.

Whether you could attend or not the conference, you should check out the following links pointing to the presentation slides made available by the HighEdWeb organizers:

Marketing, PR, etc.

• E-Cards: Using a Thoughful Tool to Communicate with Current and Future Students (PPT file) by Thomas Marrone (Southeast Missouri State University)
• A Day in the (Online) Life of a Humble News Release (PPT file) by Lori Packer (University of Rochester)
• Get a Clue: Shift Happens (PPT file) by Gordy Pace (The University of Montana)
• Feeding the Hand that Feeds You: Supporting Enrollment Efforts (PPT file) by Rob Liesland (Xavier University)
• Authenticity 101: Redefining College Marketing (PDF file) by Jeff Kalay (Target X)

Cool Web Thingies

• Web Accessibility: How Higher Education is Responding to the Need (PPT file) by Terry Thompson (University of Washington)
• Creating a College Web Style Guide: Principles, Processes, and Prototypes (ZIP file) by Jesse Racine (McHenry County College)
• Colors on the Web: Few Things, Great Results (Website) by Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel (University Anhembi Morumbi)
• The Accessible Video Interface (ZIP file) by Gabriel McGovern (Portland Community College)
• Card Sorting: Research That Every Web Developer Should Use (PPT file) by Douglas Tschopp (Augustana College)
• Search Engine Optimization 2008: Beyond META Tags (PPT file) by Brian Smith (University at Albany)
• New Initiatives in Web Standards Education (PDF file) by Chris Mills (Opera Software ASA)
• Hello, Is Anyone Out There? Using Web Analytics to Understand Your Audience by Kyle James (Wofford College)
• View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: #heweb08 heweb08)

Projects (CMS, Redesign, etc.)

• Blogger + Jott = Crisis Communications (PPT file) by Paula Ganyard (University of Wisconsin – Green Bay)
• It Isn’t About the Feature Set: Selecting a Web Content Management System that Works for You (ZIP file) by Anthony Dunn (CSU, Chico)
• Our Pilot Adventure with Luminis IV Leading the Way (PPT file) by Sripriya Giridharan (Seton Hall University)
• Using Our Web CMS to Produce Academic Catalogs (PPT file) by Anne Macdonald (Suffolk University)
• Web Services for Web Services (PPT file) by Kevin Bischof (Xavier University)
• Designing a New User-Centric College Public Website: Lessons Learned (PPT file) by George Sackett (St. Louis Community College)
• Bedework Calendar Implementation Details (PDF file) by Cornelia Ann Bailey (University of Chicago)
• University-Wide Web CMS Implementation – Failure, Then Success (QuickTime Movie file) by James Buratti (Texas State University)
• Academic Alert System (PPT file) by Carla Bates (Missouri University of Science and Technology)
• Bold Fusion: Blending Our Marketing & IT Teams (PDF file) by Lee Staton (Indiana University Southeast)
• Migra(tio)n Headaches? (ZIP file) by Keith Slayden (Ithaca College)
• Wiki + Shared Drive + DocMgmt = Our Intranet (PDF file) by May Chang (University of Maryland)
• Getting Started with WordPress (Website) by Stephanie Leary (Texas A&M University Writing Center)
• A (pod) cast of hundreds (PPT file) by Steve Hodges (IUPUI)
• Webcasting (PPT file) by Joel Doepker (Ozarks Technical Community College)
• CRM Patterns, Puzzles & Prose: Bridging the gap for internal audiences (PPT file) by Paul Redfern (Gettysburg College)
• Identity Management: How and Why (PPT file) by Kirk M. Anne (SUNY Geneseo)
• CMS Success at Princeton University (ZIP file) by John Wagner (Princeton University)
• Vlogging Student Life Events (not as dirty as it sounds) (ZIP file) by Todd Sanders (UW-Green Bay)

Techies’ Corner

• Higher Ed on Rails (ZIP file) by Sven Aas (Mount Holyoke College)
• Cross-Site Scripting: What is it, and how can you protect your site from becoming a victim? (PPT file) by Paul Gilzow (University of Missouri)
• Why Microformats? (ZIP file) by Daniel M. Frommelt (University of Wisconsin – Platteville)
• Avoiding the JavaScript:void(‘’): Building Web Apps That Work Anywhere and Everywhere (PPT file) by Jason Pitoniak (Rochester Institute of Technology)
• Adding Interactive Content to Your Website Using JQuery (ZIP file) by Jaclyn Whitehorn (The University of Alabama)
• HTTP 201 – Or, What Happens When Your User-Agent Isn’t A Browser? (ZIP file) by Jason Woodward (Cornell University)
• Agile Web Development (PPT file) by C. Daniel Chase (University of Colorado)
• Test-driven Development for Web Applications (ZIP file) by Brett Bieber (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
• Driving a Hybrid: The Basics of Adobe AIR (ZIP file) by Christina Dulude (Duke University)

There was also some live blogging (and twittering) going on at the conference. Karlyn Morissette compiled most of the posts on the eduguru blog.

That’s what I’ve learned this morning by reading “Emergency Alerts via Facebook and MySpace Are New Ways to Reach Students,” an article written by Jeffrey Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A group of researchers at the [University of Maryland at College Park] is also working to build a prototype of a homemade social network for the university’s Web site designed for use in emergency situations. The project is an outgrowth of work by Ben Shneiderman, a professor of computer science at the university, and Jennifer J. Preece, dean of the university’s College of Information Studies. They published an article in Science last year proposing that local governments develop social networks to supplement 911 emergency hotlines.

Mr. Shneiderman said he got the idea after typing “911″ into Google and getting no useful results. “I said, “Something is wrong here—I think of the Web as my source of communication.”

Now a graduate student at Maryland, Philip Fei Wu, is building a prototype for university use. “We hope to create a platform to allow students to communicate, to exchange ideas, to comment on ideas” in an emergency, Mr. Wu said in an interview.

As I said in the comment I posted on Wired Campus, the Chronicle’s blog, I don’t think a social networking website designed to be used just for emergencies can do the job.

It makes sense to incorporate the features in the daily activities of its potential users, but they won’t probably remember to log in if something happens.

What do YOU think?

This morning, I received two emails asking if it was still possible to register for the May 7 webinar about crisis/emergency websites presented by Mike Dame from Virginia Tech (the initial registration deadline was yesterday).

As a result, I decided to postpone the registration deadline until this Friday (May 2) at 9PM ET. If you want to learn more on why and how to design a crisis/emergency web template for your institution, this webinar will help.

Institutions registered for this series include:

• Alfred University
• Appalachian State University
• Augusta State University
• Cape Fear Community College
• Christopher Newport University
• Colorado State University
• Grant MacEwan College
• Hiram College
• Kettering University
• Lesley University
• Lynn University
• Michigan State University
• Plymouth State University
• St Norbert College
• State University of NY at New Paltz
• Texas Christian University
• Texas Tech University
• The University of Melbourne
• Univ of Tennessee Health Science Center
• University of Alaska Fairbanks
• University of Delaware
• University of Florida
• Upper Iowa University
• West Chester University

For more information and to register online, just go to www.higheredexperts.com/911website

And, if you have any problems or issues, just send me an email at karine@collegewebeditor.com

My second UB column for 2008 is now available in the April issue as well as online: “It’s 2008: Is Your 911 Website Ready?”

When I wrote this article, my goal was to give you a good piece of third-party validation (hey, you can even print the article so it looks like it was xeroxed from the magazine and share it with your favorite VP and president) to get to work on your crisis web template.

You’ll find in this column 8 tips from several of your peers (including Mike Dame of Virginia Tech) to get you started.

After interviewing Mike for this article, I thought that this would also make a great topic for a webinar for Higher Ed Experts. Mike agreed and will present this special webinar on May 7, 2008:

911 Website: How to design your crisis/emergency web template
Michael Dame, Director of Web Communications at Virginia Tech, will explain why every higher education institution should prepare a crisis web template and how Virginia Tech’s made a big difference on April 16, 2007. He will also walk you through the steps necessary to build a best-of-breed crisis website and share a basic coded template to get you started

For more information and to register (by April 28, 2008), please visit www.higheredexperts.com/911website

By the way, if you are a University Business reader who has just discovered collegewebeditor.com, welcome! Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog via RSS or email.

Higher Ed Experts was officially launched on April 23, 2007.

It was supposed to go live on April 17, but it just didn’t feel right to do it as scheduled after the tragedy that stroke Virginia Tech. As you can imagine, I had many sleepless nights in April 2007 working on the launch of this new website as well as the new venture it was supposed to support.

Since the launch (and the rocky start with my first web conferencing vendor – I now work with WebEx, the market leader), I’ve witnessed more than 1,200 people working in universities and colleges becoming Higher Ed Experts members and 863 webinars being taken in more than 200 different higher ed institutions.

Over these past 12 months, I designed and scheduled 3 free events and 7 different live 3-webinar series. The resulting 23 webinars are now available on-demand and can be bought as part of their original series.

That’s the rule that has been implemented since the beginning. That’s a rule I’m going to lift at the request of several HEE members until April 15, 2008 with a special limited-time offer to celebrate HEE first anniversary:

The Pick-and-Choose Webinar Series
www.higheredexperts.com/pickandchoose

Until April 15, 2008, you can select and buy your favorite 3 on-demand webinars — even if they belong to different series — for just $300 and you’ll get the 4th webinar of your choice for free.

This special offer is only available to HEE members who can pay via credit card before April 15, 2008. Purchased webinars will have to be watched by June 30, 2008.

www.higheredexperts.com/pickandchoose

By now, you’ve heard the news: a gun man shot 22 people yesterday at Northern Illinois University. Seven Six – including the gunman – died.

All my prayers go to the families and friends of the victims as well as to the whole campus community at Northern Illinois University.

There are some blog posts I would rather not write. This is one of them, but as I did at the time of the Virginia Tech Tragedy, I think it’s important for the higher ed web and communication community to keep a record of the way NIU is handling this tragic event.

Higher Ed blogger, Andy Careaga, reported the news with a first screenshot of the graphic-rich homepage yesterday evening before it was replaced by the emergency web page you can see below.

Previous time stamped updates from this page are available via a link on a secondary web page, clearly following a blog format as VT did last year.

The NIU web team has also used another common feature of blogs: strikethroughs to indicate changes in information previously posted.

Update: screenshot taken on Feb 16 (including memorial masthead)

NIU has also set up a memorial website following the approach Virginia Tech took last year.

Students went back to class on February 25. Here’s a screenshot taken on Feb 26:

I’ll try to update this post with more screenshots if/when major changes are applied to the NIU homepage.

By now, you’ve probably heard (or seen on TV or on the Web) what happened last night at Union University in Jackson, TN.

As reported by Ashley Anthony of The Jackson Sun in “Union University tornado damage update”, 2 dormitories were destroyed in Tuesday night’s tornado, 51 students were taken to the hospital and 9 stayed overnight.

But, this emergency situation also made another casualty: the university website.

As far as I can tell, the website was down all this morning — until 12:30PM ET.

Since an error page including an online form showed up at that time, I guess it wasn’t due to power failure, but more probably to a surge in web traffic (although I could be wrong on this and will update you as soon as I hear back from the communication office at Union University).

This didn’t prevent the communication team to do its job and keep the campus community as well as parents and alums updated about the situation in Jackson, TN.

At 1:12AM (local time, I presumed), a first post including updates was posted on the UUEmergency blog set up at blopgspot.com.

This blog was accessible via a special web address: www.uuemergency.com, an address mentioned in the Jackson Sun article:

People interested in university updates should visit www.uuemergency.com., until Union University’s Web site is working.

“As soon as we can get the Web site back up, we will use that to communicate with parents, volunteers, whoever,” Mark Khahler, communications director, said.

Several updates were posted on this blog as well as a slideshow of photos from campus. And, the blog also allowed parents, friends and alums to ask questions or offer help by posting comments.

Union University also shared updates, photos as well as videos on its official Facebook page.

All this was done as the website was down. So, kudos go to the web/communication team at Union University.

The only thing (besides not having the website go down) I would have done differently is get my IT folks redirect www.uu.edu traffic to www.uuemergency.com when the campus servers were down, which would have automatically provided updates to the people checking the homepage. I might be wrong, but I think blogspot – i.e. Google – servers could have handled the surge in traffic

What do you think?

Since the Virginia Tech Tragedy, higher ed institutions all over the US, Canada and even Australia have been revisiting their emergency preparedness and crisis communication plans.

While planning is very important, a plan is as good as its testing. That’s why many institutions went through emergency drills and other tests lately.

Back in September 2007, I blogged about such a drill conducted at Humboldt State University.

Last Wednesday, Winona State University went through its second test of the sort. Rick Rhone, University Webmaster and a regular reader of this blog, was kind enough to share in an email a screenshot and his thoughts about the drill. Rick gave me the permission to quote some parts of his message:

This was our second test in three weeks and it went pretty smoothly.

We notified the campus community via email that the test was going to be performed and gave them a general time of the Alert. From there, we notified the Campus switchboard, IT Phone Support and Campus security (who notified local law enforcement) that we are performing a test only of the web notification system.

My advice for others is to work closely with the individuals who are responsible for the Universities Emergency Procedures. We are finding out after Virginia Tech, that we were really behind the power curve as to what we need to do (from a web perspective) to be ready for this type of situation. After working on this for the last few months, I have the utmost respect for those at VT that had to perform this on the fly.

Also, if they have problems during the test, that’s not a bad thing, that’s what the test is for. We had problems the first time getting pages to publish through our CMS, we identified the problem and the second test was flawless.

We found out that a lot more people looked at our page and noticed the change immediately. I received several phone calls from people saying that it really helps.

Have you done this kind of tests at your campus? Have you recently created/updated your crisis/emergency web template? Do you have any tips to share with your peers?

I’m currently wrapping up the research around these questions for my next University Business column, so feel free to email me at karine@collegewebeditor.com or post a comment to share your insights.

You might also want to submit your template, so I can include it in the gallery of crisis/emergency websites hosted at Higher Ed Experts.