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.
What a tragedy. Like you, I too hate to write these kinds of blog posts. But it’s important to chronicle what’s happening from a crisis communications standpoint for the rest of the higher ed community and beyond. From all appearances and from media reports I’ve read and seen, it looks like NIU handled emergency communications quite well. Tragedies like these point out the importance of crisis communications planning and execution. It’s tough to take an objective, analytical look at these events in the midst of the tragedy and its immediate aftermath. But it is a necessity. Thank you for your informative post.
i think they are doing an amazing job with their website to communicate to the public what is going on. if your school has not had a serious strategic meeting about crisis communications, as we have not, you are providing a disservice to your students, faculty and staff. i wish we would get our heads out of the sand. but i’m proud of schools that are proactive in protecting their communities.
Karine, thanks for your continued coverage on this. Some could say it is beating a dead horse, but I hope that through you efforts people take the need to prepare and have a plan and the necessary tools in place to react quickly. I think NIU did a steller job in a obviously unavoidable and bad situation.
Thanks for weighting in Andy, Nourisha and Matt.
Matt – actually, I don’t think I’m beating a dead horse. If you observe closely what NIU is implementing in the wake of this crisis, you can clearly see that they follow closely the route Virginia Tech took last year. As you all know we are learning from each others in higher education, that’s why it’s so important to share this information and make it available (and easily retrievable). By speaking about his experience at several conferences, Mike Dame from Virginia Tech did a great service to the community.
Karine, I don’t want you to think I was being negative with my comment, I most definatley wasn’t. I am very supportive and think it is of great service. I have forwarded on all your posts about crisis communications to the crisis team at my school. I read the post that Andrew just wrote and your comments and I 100% agree. My dead horse comment was just to show that some people might view it that way but that I did not agree. I think through showing this I hope, as I said in my earlier comment “that through your efforts people take the need to prepare and have a plan and the necessary tools in place to react quickly”.
I will pass this coverage on the to people at my university as well. Thanks