Second-Guessing Virginia Tech’s Crisis Communications

The second-guessing is under way to affix blame and analyze what authorities could have done to lessen the damage Monday in the Virginia Tech campus shooting spree.

The extent of information shared with the campus population about a shooting at a dormitory that morning has been described as too little, too late.

The technical college eventually activated its mass e-mail system to warn students and staff about the early morning shooting, but there were few details that could realistically help anyone protect themselves from an armed attacker walking into a classroom and shooting.

Our local school went into lockdown recently, after a parent of a child made a disturbing comment that was passed on to the principal. Parents were quickly informed of the situation, and were given the option of bringing their kids home if they were concerned about their safety in the school.

I didn’t get the call until later, because the school alerts are delivered to the home phone instead of my cell phone.

In the case of Virginia Tech, a similar automated phone  message sent to home phones wouldn’t have reached many people before they left for campus. Blogger Andy Carvin suggests a mass SMS alert, sent to cell phones would have been most effective at reaching people quickly, alerting them of the possible risk. He doesn’t see message broadcast services like Twitter and Jaiku being able to handle this sort of service, but it’s worth thinking about all the options available.

In a crisis, you need the right people to have the right information as soon as possible; they must have authority to declare a crisis, and a system in place to get the message out quickly and thoroughly.

Some of the students and staff at Virginia Tech are saying the administration didn’t do enough to warn them that a murderer might be loose on campus. A two hour delay after an on-campus shooting does seem slow, given the widespread use of portable communications devices among police and campus security forces. Of course, if every random act of violence on campus were broadcast, people would start to tune out the repeated warnings.

How many lives would have been saved in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers if better information had gotten to office workers and rescuers sooner? Quite a few, I suspect.

It’s a balance that every official must weigh when considering what to announce, when, and in what way. It’s possible an earlier warning on campus might have saved some lives. It’s likely that it wouldn’t have changed the result much.

When the potential damage is so severe, officials have to seriously consider providing too many warnings rather than too few.

Tags: virginia tech, shootings, sms, alerts, warnings, crises, campus, shootings