Articles by Levick Experts

During the chaos that followed the shootings at Virginia Tech, administrators tried to make sense of what happened while simultaneously dealing with demands for answers from students, faculty, families of the victims, and the horde of media that besieged Blacksburg.

Two dominant questions, at least from some critics, have plagued Virginia Tech in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Why, in the two-hour gap between the shootings, did the university fail to alert students and faculty that a gunman was on the loose and lock down campus?

Should Virginia Tech officials have paid closer attention to warning signs about Cho Seung-Hui prior to the rampage that could have prevented it from happening in the first place?

These questions have prompted universities across the country to rethink their communications strategies crises. What are the quickest, most effective alerting mechanisms? Automated phone warnings? Text messages? Email? A combination of available communication channels? How should university officials balance the enormous demand for information from the media with responsibilities to those most affected?

Fortunately, universities have, by definition, closely integrated and centralized communications infrastructures (as opposed to municipalities, even small ones). The key is to know how to fully utilize those existing IT networks to maximize internal communications during crisis.

To be sure, a tragedy of the dimensions of Virginia Tech should never be a pretext for glib second-guessing, particularly from those who have never faced a crisis with only minimal information available in real time. That said, the massacre does underscore the anxieties of so many universities and similar institutions about their own levels of preparedness, in terms of their ability to control a crisis as it develops as well as the best way to publicly communicate during and afterward.

In fact, the two are interrelated. Responsible media can allow the institution to publicly communicate in a way that manages the crisis and that may prevent further damage or tragedy. New blueprints thus include, or should include, a number of key action points. Among the most important:

• Act. A crisis abhors a vacuum. When you are at the center of an unfolding crisis, you never have enough information or time. It is nearly always better to act decisively than to wait for information gaps to be filled. In the Virginia Tech case, the authorities did act decisively based on what they thought had happened, as opposed to not acting at all.
• Implement new technological solutions to campus-wide communications. There are new high-tech solutions that permit instantaneous communications, while many “old-tech” systems – air-raid sirens equipped with oral communications capabilities – can also be remarkably effective in a crisis.
• Create a flexible crisis communications plan that assigns specific responsibilities to specific people, and that anticipates myriad contingencies and levels of crisis.
• Create a central information source for both the university community and the media. Staff this entity with individuals trained to reassure, to disseminate available information, and to credibly advise what is being done to gather and provide all new information as it becomes available. 
• Communicate transparently with the media and maximize their access to university administration and law enforcement officials. Remember that, in such situations, the media can be a trustworthy vehicle to widely communicate emergency information to the public. Contact media sources now to explore ways for a university spokesperson to have immediate access to the airways in the event of a crisis. 
• Simultaneously anticipate that some media will be aggressive or even hostile. Train your spokespersons to take the heat – to avoid being defensive and to possibly enlist media representatives as crisis management collaborators. Here too, contacting relevant media now, before a crisis, creates the best chance for collaboration during crisis.   
• Convey all you know – who, what, when, where, and, if possible, why – but have specific steps to protect the community fully articulated and ready to disseminate. 
• Focus on the here and now – how you’re doing everything possible to tend to the needs of everyone involved. Avoid conjecture of any sort.

It is not enough for institutions to plan for crises. They must start implementing those plans now.