Communicating with College Students (in Emergencies)

Over the course of the semester, we have covered topics each week that have sparked my interest even more in their particular areas. However, two topics have stuck with me over the course of the semester in which I want to fuse together into one topic…how to communicate with today’s college students in times of emergency. This is a very challenging topic for student affairs professionals and university administrators due to the amount of protection they owe the university community. I guess this blog could also relate to communicating with students in general regardless of the situation. Through personal experience, I have noticed significant changes in the ways students respond to communication from me as well as other students affairs professionals just in the past two to three years. In times of crisis, it is imperative to have an effective communication system in place to notify the entire university community immediately to avoid further problems associated with the emergency. In today’s technologically savvy world of communication, there are several areas of communication that should be utilized in times of emergency and they are as follows: e-mail, Facebook, Myspace, text messaging, and others. Each of these methods should be utilized in order to communicate with everyone.

E-mail
E-mail has become very out-dated in terms of communicating with students, and it does not have the same effectiveness as it did several years ago. Today, college students have become apathetic towards e-mail, especially campus-wide e-mail. With the excessive amount of university e-mails sent out daily, it is easy for students to overlook an “emergency” e-mail as opposed to a brown bag luncheon lecture or a new exhibit at the library. Also, some student inboxes are rarely checked resulting in being bounced back claiming that the mailbox is full. As mentioned in a blog I was reading about the topic, the author made a great point by saying that “if we want to communicate with them efficiently, we probably should look into using their preferred media rather than trying to force them to use email which they do not understand, and which they fear.”

Facebook/Myspace
Of course, the first thing many college students do as soon as they wake up is check their Facebook account…if they haven’t already done so on their iPhone, Blackberry, etc. Many universities are already utilizing this interface, but it is the responsibility of the student to “Friend” the university or join a particular university group to be up to speed with alerts and other communication the university may deem important. Of course, there could be problems with Facebook and/or Myspace if duplicate accounts are created as imposters, but hopefully, that would never be the case!

Text Messaging
Text messaging has become to “go-to” means of communicating with students lately. From a personal standpoint, I never thought text messaging would be as utilized as it is today to communicate with students. As an staff member, it is easier to communicate with my students because I know they receive the message as soon as I send it, and I can receive a response almost immediately, if they are not in class, of course! The implementation of the REBALERT interface at Ole Miss has been very effective in notifying the community of weather warnings/watches, and fortunately, we have not had to utilize the program for a campus crisis. Unless something drastic changes, I would think that text messaging is the most reliable means of communicating with a large amount of people in a short amount of time.

Others
So, barring a severe emergency that cuts our communications methods, how does the university communicate with students? For example, if Oxford and the University suffer a major hit to all telecommunications (phone, internet, etc.), how do we get a quick message to all students? Some universities are actually tackling that issue at a rapid pace. The use of the campus emergency system (sirens) has been a popular method recently. The warning system has the capability of playing a message to alert the area of any type of situation that may arise. Of course, the other way is to use the old-fashioned means of communication and use word of mouth, which could be scary!

Over the next five to ten years, technology will probably completely change what I have written about in this blog, but it is important for universities to constantly evaluate their communications methods to ensure that the university community is aware of any and all emergencies on campus.

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2008/08/21/communicating-with-college-students-using-their-own-media/