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Description
Crisis communication practices on college campuses have evolved a great deal since the Clery Act of 1990 was enacted to try to better protect students by making information available to the public in a timely fashion about crime and campus safety. The ways through which college campuses communicate with their students and campus populations has changed dramatically, especially with the advent of social media and smartphones. Emergency notification systems are utilized extensively by college emergency management officials as they work to push critical information out via multi-layered and multimodal emergency notification systems. The forcing factors of university notifications is really the back-end reporting requirements and standards such as those required by the Federal government’s Clery Act or related university system mandates such as that from the California State University (CSU) Chancellor’s Office Executive Orders on Emergency Management. Likely many of the decision-making concerns of senior university leadership are really their personal requirements for reporting and compliance. New technologies are used across the nation but are only a partial solution. Senior university leadership must specifically deal with the Clery Act and other compliance reporting and public visibility and documentation of its actions. This thesis analyzes and studies not only the literature on crisis communication during emergencies on college campuses, but also provides case studies of actual emergencies on college campuses and the campus’s response. Within the thesis, various best practices on the subject matter are presented - including student perception, compliance with emergency notifications, as well as social media utilization. By studying crisis communication during emergencies on college campuses, the goal is to be better equipped to respond and more resilient during the recovery phase. Training and understanding of the accountability and motivation for senior leaders in universities often is a very different perception of what is important versus that of those officials and staff actually involved in the crisis communication and alerting. How such emergency management staff can build up and support their university leadership probably needs to consider what the forcing factors and accountability of senior leadership are in their careers and perceived responsibilities to the campus and community.
