Sign West Virginia Permission Slip Safe

Document type sign permission slip west virginia safe

hello it's Thursday September 26 2019 at one o'clock in the east and this is higher ed special edition I'm your host Andrea Boyle tippet from the University of Delaware today we are talking about what's undeniably one of the most important topics out there safety on many campuses including my own different units handle different aspects of safety there's policing mental health Student Conduct emergency preparedness medical assistance the list goes on and on it can be hard for students to know where to look for information and that can make it hard for them to know what to do my guest today Tony Dobie from West Virginia University and his team tackled the sticky issue of bringing together messaging owned by different stakeholders and presenting it in one easy to access spot Tony is the Senior Director of Marketing at West Virginia University where he has positioned the university as a leader in creative marketing and social media he is a vocal advocate for new and innovative approaches to marketing in higher-end at WVU he leads a team of talented social media managers market researchers advertisers marketing strategists and trademark licensing and brand experts in 2015 he was named a 30 under 30 rising star PR by PR news and under his leadership WVU has earned numerous accolades for its innovative social media and video content today's higher ed special edition is part of the higher ed live Network episodes offer you direct access to the best and brightest minds and education the conversation is better when you join in and we encourage you to do so using the hashtag higher ed live higher end live is produced by M stoner a digital first agency committed to tailored solutions that drive real results all of our hire and live episodes are easy and free to access in the video archives at hire and live comm or you can take it with you on the go as a podcast today's episode is made possible by PR essays counselors to higher education professional interest section counselors to higher ed provides PR professionals working in colleges and universities with publication insights into the best ways to promote the value power and appropriate role of communications and marketing functions within your institutions and terrific networking opportunities as well as virtual events please mark your calendars for our next webinar that's on October 29th the topic will be homegrown social media influencers how to empower your students as brand ambassadors but that is not until next month today let's chat with Tony welcome Tony hi there thanks for having me absolutely so why don't you give us some insights on what you're doing at West Virginia yeah yeah happy to I'm gonna run through these slides hopefully they work and then you know as we have questions and things we can we can do that as well so are you are you seeing some slides on your end Andrea I not seeing I sign the slides just yet but unfortunately we have a little delay of 20 seconds or so hopefully maybe start talking we'll be seeing them let's let's see what happens preview with the previous 20 seconds behind if you wanted all right so let me let me talk to you a little bit about West Virginia University so we are a public land-grant institution in Morgantown West Virginia we have about 30,000 students and three different campuses so we have one in the Eastern Panhandle one in the south of the state as well and we have two health sciences campuses as well so we we consider ourselves the flagship institution of the University of the state and so this for us is a really crucial issue so in this session we will learn why our students are so worried about their safety um we'll see the process for developing a comprehensive campus-wide safety and wellness website which is what we did and gain tips for communicating safety and wellness messaging to students and then I'll talk a little bit about faculty and and staff and parents as well so let's talk it looks like these slides are a little off but we'll go with it so Generation Z is a nervous population this is the the most nervous group of students that we have and for that reason alone safety and wellness is such an issue so if you and one of the things is they think about safety all the time I'm sure on your campuses you are hearing about safety and wellness issues maybe you are more so now than you did five years ago we for sure are so this topic is one that at least we've seen increase we see more talk more people talking about it and something that we really could not ignore so let me talk a little bit more about Gen Z Gen Z has lived in a world where safety is a constant concern so they were born after 9/11 they have routine active shooter drills in school they have you know news headlines almost all the time about violence in schools they there is a higher bullying right now than there ever has been before specifically in high schools across the country and mental health is being talked about more now than ever before so this generation and when I talk about this generation it's pretty much every student that we are trying to recruit and all of our students that are currently on campus for the most part unless unless they're a little bit older and millennial or or above generation so I wanted to give you a little bit of an idea of what we really have to think about now knowing that this generation is just a little bit different so first we need to understand that students want more information on safety that's that is the necessary piece of this they want to know that they're safe when they come to the to this to your campus they're going to want to know that they'll be taken care of and then they will be safe so they grew up like I said with active shooter drills and rarely on our campuses at least I can I can speak to WVU we rarely or ever have had a campus comprehensive safety drill that's just not something that higher ed does and they are so used to it in high school that's just something that happens consistently all the time they know the protocols and because we don't have this in higher ed it causes anxiety and if we did the process would be much different you know you would you would do some things differently we would do things differently on our campus than what students would do in high school and an active shooter situation for example I was mentioning before we started that I hadn't police officer come speak to my freshman class yesterday and she noted that we didn't have coins of gathering and she pointed out to them the differences between how an active shooter situation might have worked in their high school versus might have worked might work on our campus you know it's an open place and so we don't have Lina this is her this is our gathering point once you've run and those sorts of things so it was interesting to me that the students were so tuned into that that she actually had to talk about you know how this will different differ from their situations in high school just just to read and push your point there absolutely and you know one of the things that we've learned as we've done research on this topic and I want to say I'm by no means an expert in safety and wellness and I just do some marketing for it but um we you know we have heard and I think everybody has heard the run hide fight three you know three word saying you know in high schools a lot of the time they were locking down so they're starting with the be hiding really and then and then they move to the next one on college campuses because to your point they are so open we have we starts differently and an active shooter in a crisis situation so it is really new and because it's new and it does create that anxiety so and you know they expect these students expect colleges and universities to provide safety measures and are not afraid to let you know if they feel unsafe that's something that we have noticed so much more over the last two or three years than we ever have before and surveys and in conversations and social media posts and comments we have seen safety and wellness pop up much much more than they have in the past and Gen Z is also concerned about its mental health this is a really different trend than we've ever really had our students do have a lot of anxiety and stress and and this generation the facts are that they have more mental mental health diagnoses than any other and they're not afraid to share that they're not doing okay what I want to say more than anything is that this is actually a really good thing they're they are more apt to tell us when they feel uncomfortable things aren't going well they're there more often likely to talk to their professors and faculty members to let them know that they are struggling a little bit so I think this is something that higher ed should definitely embrace and and from a marketing perspective it's something that we're taking on board and changing some things that I'll talk about a little bit on because of that and just in general our students expect a high level of mental mental health support as well and and they expected that's that's just something that is available to them and if not that's a huge negative so it's how briefly about how we got to where we needed this sort of a website and I'll I'll just say fairly clearly that this really started for us around a campus carry conversation that popped up earlier this year with it within our state West Virginia was the legislature was looking at passing campus carry on public university campuses across the it was a really highly contested debate across the state West Virginia is a fairly conservative state in terms of the way that it votes so there was a lot of back-and-forth that I think just to make make a point the University and all of the public universities in the state were against it and it ended but the debate really really really went on and to the point where we had some protests on campus one day where a couple of hundred faculty staff and students came out to in opposition to it so we spent a good I think probably a couple of months preparing for the fact that campus carry was going to pass in West Virginia and that we need to be prepared with as much safety and wellness information as we can and and that's where that website idea really came out very simplistic but the rule the law in West Virginia at least prior to this conversation was that there was you weren't the only individuals who are allowed on campuses to Carrie gone were police officers is that fair yes correct correct and then you would need a concealed carry permit to carry if that if the campus carry were to pass yeah so but you know for as we moved forward through the through the legislative session and actually as see here the campus carry bill ended up failing at pretty much the last minute and it was a pretty close vote but you know it was something that you know as we planned and we plan and we plan for this to pass and then ended it so what we ended up with is a lot of preparation for something that you know didn't end up happening which I feel like you know all of us in PR a marketing that's about half of what we do it's kind of prepare for the worst-case scenario yes but so so we I think whenever we we ended that discussion and the spring we we realized that regardless of what happened with that the conversation about a comprehensive safety and wellness campaign and website it's still really important and something that we needed to do so over the summer and and late in the spring semester we really started the conversations about what can we do to make this something that can be beneficial to students faculty and staff on campus so what I and then just add to this and this is something that's that's been not new but increasing in number over I would say the last eight months we have seen so many more students on our campus posting public social media comments about safety and wellness concerns we used to have this in the past but they are bringing many more things to light than they have in the past things that they're upset with things that they've gone through that they want to talk publicly about those those things have the potential to be very damaging to the reputation of the university but they're also really serious concerns that we want to take seriously as a university so those are the types of things that we have seen more of and are trying to find ways to deal with them the best we can I'll talk a little bit about how weird how we're dealing with that later on as we go through this so so we knew based on all of those things that we had to do something different so I want to walk through I think it's eight or nine steps things that list the steps that we had to take to make this safety and wellness campaign happen the first thing that we did and step one was to survey students and we did we did a kind of an informal survey at least in terms of higher ed purposes but we knew that we needed to get to students where they were and where they were having comments and concerns and complaints and a lot of those happens on Instagram and Twitter so we decided do this survey on our Instagram story from from our main university accounts West Virginia you there were more slides than this but I just wanted to show you and give you an idea of what it looks like so we gave them a poll that they could kind of move it lower or higher depending on how and form they felt about the topic and then we gave them the opportunity to give us feedback things that they wanted to know more about then really this was a great start for us because beforehand we were really relying on what we felt from a communications and marketing background that we needed to get out to students this gave us an opportunity to look at what we really needed to work on first and prioritize so as you can see by the the little poll there active shooter procedures actually the one that rated lowest on there and as we realized and went through the process it was rightly so we really didn't have a spot on any website anywhere that talked about what to do that was easily accessible with what to do for a student or faculty and staff member in an active shooter situation so that was step one we really needed to find out what they wanted to hear and know more about Instagram stories for this sort of feedback I know we've used it minimally not for a survey in this kind of way but have you used it with success I mean obviously use it with success here but is that something you're finding more and more valuable i I think Instagram and especially Instagram stories is a really powerful tool to talk to students in any way so we we do a lot of qaz interactive pieces like like this with Instagram stories and I think you know if in concern to this particular situation we had about 500 comments and feedback and I and I think we had more than I think it was I can double check but I think it was upwards of 5,600 5,000 or 6,000 people that actually used the polling tool to let us know so in terms of you know actually going and doing a survey sending it via email and all of that stuff actually we had better results than we would have had if we did that type of thing so yeah yeah so I know there are there are certain limitations with insta story but to me that's the stuff that we work around and in this case we were still able to get all of the detail and information that we need so in next thing that we really did is we we took time and we searched our own websites and we have we have thousands of them and hundreds of them and that focused on topics around safety and wellness we started so we started to just go through all of those websites that that had any relationship to this project and take a look and build a running list of the programs available the information that we have the tips and tricks and all of those things that we give to students somewhere in our WVU atmosphere so we have a word doc that is you know tens of pages long with all of the websites all of the information and and things like that that existed so this was probably the most crucial step it was the step that took the longest because it gave us an opportunity to see what was out there without that I think we would have started to reinvent the wheel a little bit and what we ealized is that a lot of the safety and wellness information and programming is out there on our web sites somewhere and through different offices and programs that we have so we didn't have to really reinvent anything we just needed to get it into a better place so after we did that we connected with areas authoring safety and wellness information at programming if that was the reason that they exist that they're at for example our University Police Department our Carew Center for mental health are well wadu Center which focuses on student health and wellness all of those departments and there are many more we had dozens that we ended up reaching out to but we started conversations with them in the sunroom about how can we partner is your website information correct are there things that you want us to prioritize over others whenever we build this website are there programs that you think are industry-leading or that you think students really need to know more about we asked all of those questions and and to help inform us in building the website that we did so after we did that step four we created a comprehensive campus safety and wellness website you can visit it at safety wdu edu and one of the state of this and and these are the conversations that we were having with folks throughout the process but this website is not meant to take the place of other websites on campus we heard that concern a lot you're taking away my website or the need for my website but we weren't all we were doing is making this place a hub so whenever a prospective student or parent wants to know about safety on our campus we have that website there that takes you to many different sites but you can start there we can start - from aiming the highest level say what are our University priorities in terms of safety and wellness and those are the pieces that we prioritize on this website all of the other safety and wellness websites and information are there but they'll be a little bit lower down or or in a different space so we created this website and I'll show you I'm not gonna show you that website feel free to go and check it out at some point but that's you perfect thank you so next step is we identified nine topics that were most important to our students based on the surveys that we've done and you can see them here active shooter pedestrian and driver safety discrimination and harassment hazing medical amnesty medical care mental health services sexual assault and tobacco and smoke free campus these were nine areas that we said when we launched this website in August these are the areas that we want to have the most detailed information on so if you go to that well if you go to the website and you click on one of these you will go to a separate and on that page you will see all of the information that you need for something like active shooter you see that we use run hide and fight and what that means you see information on how to get informed if this sort of situation happens on campus there's information there on training our University Police Department does an active shooter training that anybody can sign up and and and do they can do it for a group that can do it individually it gives them an opportunity to to be active and proactive and getting that information and and learning the steps they need to take and those types of things I'll point out the one in the middle medical and this team this is really our bars bystander awareness program before this website existed there was no information online anywhere at the University around medical amnesty so so for us this was huge it was an opportunity for us to get out a little bit more of the word about what it is how students qualify for something like this how it can save lives and there's a really important thing to know about so that's to me more than anything the fact that this website exists and that information is is there along with all the other things but that's the reason why this is important and gives an opportunity for us to share really really important crucial information to students who really want to know more about it so okay so we did that the next thing that we did is we create a dedicated social media channels for this effort so once the website was live and everything was good to go we were as we were building the website we were working on a social media strategy we we have a Facebook and a Twitter account for this the Twitter account is the one I'd suggest to look at its at w6t and it is used basically to help promote safety and wellness on campus but specifically this this website before you know we were relying on university police or some of those other areas to tweet out on their own or some social media tips safety links all of those types of things and and the reality of it is if there aren't a ton of social media managers and those areas where we have a dedicated team and staff to do that here so for us we can make things consistent on brand we can talk about those University priorities when we need to if there are situations that happen on campus and we need to subtly touch on those and give some safety tips based on things that we know we can do that now and and it has been a huge benefit to us as well and just add to it the left screenshot there as you can see we ended up splitting apart two accounts so we used to have a university police specific Twitter account what we decided to do was turn that University Police Twitter account into our crisis alert Twitter account which is at 2:00 the new alert so that account is only used now in a crisis situation what we had heard before from our students is that combining the general universities safety tips with crisis communications was confusing to them or they were missing out on the crisis information because they started to ignore the account because there were so many tips and other informations and they they just didn't care about so we went to actively view alert there and @w safety is something that was new but we we started to put those tips and other information in that area okay so we did that now the next thing we started to do is is make this a priority from day one so on the left is a slide from a presentation that are some students led during our Welcome Week activities we had a an optional presentation that students as specifically new students could come to and it was an hour-long presentation focused specifically on safety and wellness was something that we've really never done before so from it was literally I think the second day they were on campus the day after move-in they had the opportunity to come to this to you all of the resources to talk to people who are in their situation as a student to talk about safety and wellness on campus and then the the piece to the right is actually a safety one pager and on the back of it is a Wellness one pager that good that we will actually put and start to put in hopefully in the next couple of days at our visitor center so whenever students and families come to visit for the first time they're able to see this from the get-go here are the resources you have in terms of safety and wellness on our campus I know our Visitor Center tour guides have heard a lot more questions from parents specifically about safety and wellness topics on those tours so this is kind of an answer to that question here are all the things that you need to know and then we can answer more specifics whenever they're on tour and things like that but this gives them a little bit of a primer to to that topic all right and then the last thing that we did and this is still a little bit ongoing just kind of vetting it with all the right people but we updated our crisis communication plan and we partnered much closer with University Police so there's that I'm in charge of our our marketing units so I in a crisis situation I'm really focused on the social media aspect April call our director of communications here at the University has focused much more on the wider external and internal comm plan for for a crisis together we've been we've been working with a couple other folks and with University Police to update our plan it was about two years ago since we updated the full plan and our social media plan was actually three or four years old so we made some significant changes specifically on the social media side one of the big ones that I'll mention is we ended what we had done in the past is every text alert that we would send is auto tweeted from our WV alert counts and what we started to see is as we had smaller crisis situations pop up you know they are and the way that Twitter has kind of changed and that if you ever log out of Twitter or you close that happen you open it back up it doesn't show you the latest tweets anymore it shows you a screen that's home or it's building the you know Twitter has its own algorithm now so it's showing you things that day wants you to see first well what we notice is that they were seeing of one-off tweets from crisis situations days later and they were seeing that the situation had already been taken care of that it they all clear was was posted so without the ability to connect our tweets together we were actually confusing a lot of people and scaring them and making them a little bit more anxious that something happened again or the same thing happened again the first thing you and I think from a user perspective you know first thing you're doing is not looking at the time that something's sweeted you're looking at what the actual text says so if you're not looking at those details then you totally are are confused so what we started to do is basically you said that first text alert that we will send out that as auto posted to Twitter and then from there our social media crisis comm team will take and update so you know we are we don't send a bunch of the text alerts in crisis situations that's just something that we haven't done in the past we use Twitter as a way in between every every 10-15 minutes to update people so in that text alert we send people to Twitter but we are we are able to now connect every single tweet together in a string from beginning a process to the end and that that I think that change is going to really help us communicate during a crisis but also make sure that we're doing things consistently getting the word out and and you know not confusing anybody so okay so that's the process that we've taken from probably about May until today so I'm gonna talk a little bit about how we'll take this and then we'll move forward a bit so we're you know our plan is to constantly update the website as issues arise on campus we know we may not have as much information as we need on on that site and new problems or issues will continue to come up so we'll use this website to highlight safety tips and programming on many different topics outside of those original online that we have we will also be adding specific information for faculty and staff and parents of current students as well that's something that we've heard as you know this website it's really good for students and it is we prioritize students and developing and launching the site we want to make sure that faculty and staff and parents have dedicated spaces as well that they know what to do in certain situations or at least they have a place to go to get to the right places to find out that type of information marketing perspective we have monthly themes that we're focusing on and you can see them here from September through November skipping December since most people are off campus then bringing them back up in January through April and and these what I what I would say to this and I've been telling a lot of folks on our campuses just because this is a monthly theme doesn't mean that we're not going to talk about these issues across every month because most of them will be but yes exactly that is something that's important at all times but we we started to say as we will have some dedicated amounts on campus we will have some dedicated marketing and advertising material we'll have some dedicated Instagram stories and university-wide marketing pieces in that month around that topic and then our hope is by April you will see advertising and marketing about all of these topics all across campus in different areas so that's kind of the idea behind the monthly themes but we are talking about these things on a week the basis from our from our accounts and and in our marketing and communication and then what we've been talking a lot about is outside the box environmental advertising so you know in our campus and a similar I'm sure it's similar across the board here we do a lot of things like posters and flyers and you know t-shirts and things like that we we do a lot of the same things what I've been talking to our team about is it's thinking outside the box a little bit let's do let's let's partner with some folks let's let's do some things in a different way to help this campaign stand out a little bit more I'll give you an example for a medical amnesty perspective we're thinking about doing some mirror graphics and restrooms across campus in a spot that they you know they can look at themselves in the mirror while they're reading this type of thing and and be like if you were in this situation would you help so make it a little bit more pointed but kind of make it interesting and different something that they will remember I think a lot of the times you know they see a ton of posters every single day it's hard to remember everything you see there so so we're working on something like that new every single month that will pop up on our campus the next thing is we have something called campus conversations which in the past has been focused around having conversations with faculty and staff but in this particular case we're going to extend this to students as well and these are large public discussions that we have with some experts so we would probably bring in experts from university police maybe city police and safety our wellness groups and have them give a little bit of our presentation but then be able to take questions from faculty and staff and students and then we're working to develop some focus groups with students in particular for later this year maybe early into next year to take a look at all of the things that we've done so far this semester and ask them what they think is it working is there more that they want to know about this whole project is better because we have brought students and we've gotten their insight it's really been our kind of guiding light throughout this and I think that's made it well I think it's made it as successful as possible because of that the things that we're hearing from students around this site are really positive a lot of them just saying you know to be able to have a place like this is great we didn't you know before we had to go to five or six websites before we realized where we needed to actually be this gives them an opportunity to not have to do that and I think they appreciate that so that's how that's what the campaign will kind of look like through the rest of the academic year and this is also something that's just not gonna go away it's a university priority we'll take a look in the spring about how we can extend and advance this for the following year as well but this is kind of a plan that we have through the end of the academic year okay and then so what I want to do kind of finishing up a couple of tips that we've learned - if you were thinking about doing something with this on your campus how you can replicate it and maybe not some things that we noticed that could help things to maybe worry about and some things maybe not to worry about so no need to reinvent the wheel this is something I think I mentioned this before but what we found is that pretty much everything that we needed outside of the the medical amnesty piece that I was talking about it all exists it online and and most of it was up-to-date and if not and that was an easy conversation - to be able to make sure that they up to the website it's what it needed to be but promote what already exists out there there's likely already a strong safety and wellness programming infor ation out there on campus if not and I would say that's probably step one to work with your university to emphasize that and build that but this effort is not to build safety and wellness information in programming it's to help share it and not necessarily from scratch so just I would say make sure you're taking a look at what already exists before you head out and do something new and then partner with those folks the more that they can be involved the better it allows you to make sure that you know there's buy-in from the get-go from all of these places that otherwise are doing things on their own and letting them know that we're not trying to steal their their spotlight but we're trying to share and make it bigger so the next thing is don't ignore comments from students around safety and wellness and this is something that we have really significantly changed over the last six months in the past we have that when we've noticed for example a student's tweet complaining about an issue with Student Conduct or a title nine issue something like that we have sent that post to the right people and made sure that on the back end of things they were dealing with it but you know we were doing what we thought we needed to do and share those posts well what we realized and started to do and change is say that's not enough I mean we can be much more open and honest and responsive publicly than we have so what we have started to do now any post that has a concern like that with safety safety and wellness we are responding as fast as possible whether we usually always do it publicly but sometimes we also taken into a private message as well and we show that we care likely we aren't specifically answering a person's concern or talking specifically about it but we are showing our concern to their issues that we care and then we're passing them on to somebody who actually can help them I say this a lot but you know social media managers have a have a tough job answering those and and fixing those questions are usually above their cake rate so what I would what we try to do is make sure that we are getting that information of who to contact who can really help like a Dean of Students or our director of diversity equity and inclusion those are the people they really need to be talking to to get their voices heard and to fix things that they think could be wrong and what we have noticed so far is that once we started to do this it has kind of lessened the blow and the hurt that our brand feels anytime these pop up because I think people instantly see okay WB responded they they are looking they see it a lot of times what has happened in the past is if we haven't responded then we have people mentioning us to that original tweet back and back and back hundreds of times sometimes saying why aren't you taking care of us what are you doing and because of that it builds and grows and becomes viral on our campus for a day or two those are the types of things we don't want to happen horrors violence had something similar where they're still training to the bottom of it I'm at the University of Delaware but there's another institution Delaware State University and there was because there was not a lot of messaging about an individual who was kind of on the loose in in the city there and they're in it kind of spurred this rumor and they actually had to have a lockdown because they thought that because social media had created such a such a problem with thinking that someone who was a great escaped criminal was on their campus when in fact for some was was not on their campus Wow and it's a good example I think of showing you know but sometimes you have to message things as they're going on you know putting in putting information out there even if you don't know much you know saying like we're on it we're working on it that sort of thing because again it does it deforms at a horror silence and you end up spinning things as people end up spinning things out of control without information yes absolutely hopefully you can still hear me I had to change my air pots were dying okay so and last piece of advice that I have is to make sure that you partner with the right people develop working groups this is something that we did from the get-go we had a had two working groups one focused on safety and wellness information and one focused on safety and wellness programming and these groups work together we brought in people from a lot of different areas of the university that's how we got a lot of our buy-in early on and so here include those who are experts in key areas and don't wait until the end of the process to communicate how this will help the school we have monthly what we call key communicator meetings so any person who is doing any sort of communication at the University is invited to that meeting I think I have been up in front of them talking about this effort since May every month kind of updating them on what we're doing how they can be involved how they can help so make sure especially if you were at a large University with many players and partners work with those folks because that'll be the best way to actually make this happen about the programming because I think a lot of the time people who are in positions like ours and communications and marketing aren't necessarily putting on programming or pairing their communications with programming yeah that really unique and important and and one of the things that we saw as we were doing research to is there was a lot of programming overlap you know we had three or four different areas doing bystander awareness training and so one of the things that we thought we talked about very early on is why is that the case how are they different can those three or four areas partner together can they develop you know who does it best who is most effective with it who has the ability to reach the most people with their training those types of things we're still working on a lot of that stuff that is by no means done and you have to bring a lot of people into into the conversation I just can't you know be marketing a communication with folks but at least we started that conversation I think as we head through the next year so we'll start to see how we'll have a fewer number of the same program and we will start to take a look at making one program for the masses and how and we think that's a that's a better way to handle things so everybody has a consistency to things sure to questions when you're talking about partners and what others are thinking about partnering to do something similar first question would be who are your most vital partners in this effort is your organization so number one and I think they are by far at the top over anybody else is University Police so we from the very GetGo brought them in and the great thing is that the way that our unit is set up we actually have direct links with University Police so on my social media team for example we have a social media specialist dedicated just to safety and wellness and transportation messaging so and she talks directly with university police all the time we have a marketing strategist who focuses in a lot of areas but one of them being University Police so for us that you know that relationship and building and making sure that that was their most important because what we realized is that more than anything University Police did it the right way they have all the trainings they had the capacity to handle large groups small groups they were prepared for training for students for faculty and staff they you know they do things by the book they are consistent those are the types of things that we saw early on and we were like okay we need to make sure that University Police is involved as much as possible and then outside of that really in terms of the partnerships we're talking about those leaders in certain other areas but I would say a strong partnership with our student life area was really critical and just because they helped they also are and a lot of the the student programming that happens like I mentioned well WP you as a as a partner but student life manages that and so to be able to kind of connect more with the student side of things and bridge the bridge that gap so those were the two that I would say are that are the biggest partners and then no effort but everything else kind of just fell in place as well my second question there was but there were there any groups that weren't necessarily on your initial list that you were surprised to find out we're doing something related to safety or that just didn't come right to mind yep and it's funny I tell I tell people this all the time once you put a website up and live it's amazing how many people contact you wanting to get involved even if we contacted them before and they but I would say so one of the areas that we weren't thinking about but we realized such a significant piece to this is our environmental health and safety group which is a really significant group on campus they handle a lot of the lab safety and they're the ones that you called if there's mold or you know other you know other issues similar to that and so you know they were on the website but we were featuring them heavily they contacted me we had a conversation and now we're working to develop a partnership where they have a larger space on the website where it's a little bit easier to find who to call when to call how often you know how quickly they should respond all of those types of things so it's I I do you know it's slowed down a little bit but at the start of the semester I was getting an email every other day from folks that wanted to be more involved to me that's a great thing that means their business working they want to be you know they want to be involved they don't see that we're taking away from them but we are supporting them and that's exactly what we want from this it's awesome I'll remind everyone that they can send some questions in via the hashtag hire alive I wanted to quickly ask well one I thought that another group that might be ignored not necessarily ignore might not come right to mind think about operations people - you know I know you all have a huge athletics department we we you know we have our football stadium filled up on the weekends and so I don't ever that's one of those safety concerns that they have their own set of concerns you know what moving mass amounts of people and accessibility issues and all those sorts of things so it's important to keep those people in mind - you know people who are dealing with events happening on your campus as well it might be dealing with groups that are not necessarily always on your campus yes and you know one of the things that I would say we have a lot of large-scale Welcome Week events we're bringing you know 5,000 people into our football stadium to make the state of West Virginia their incoming class we have a concert the the day before classes that I think had about 20,000 people there we have have seen and heard more concerned than ever around large crowds under security in those spaces and making sure that they feel comfortable there so we have amped up police presence we have developed specific emergency protocols I mean they'd already existed but we have put it now publicly on a website promoted and made sure people know what to do if something happened because you know it's it's one of those things and I think for a long time we have always been prepared but we have always ignored or or not really saw the need for it to be publicly shared that we had a plan now I think we're getting to the point where everybody wants it so let's hear it and the fact that we have it is a great thing we shouldn't be ashamed of it we should be proud that we are as prepared as we are and and people will become more comfortable knowing that so and I can imagine is one of those things tactically - you might want to be reinforced a messaging within you know it's inside of an arena on the on the big screens or football and the programs or you know any of those things and announcements that are made at basketball games all those sorts of things might be also other tactics that you can deploy as this involves about what to do in the amount of an emergency yes absolutely spot-on our athletic department does a really really good job again partnering with University Police and police from around the state and city to make it very clear that they've they've got things you know very clearly marked and what to do in certain situations where to go you know clear bag policy has been a huge thing that that changed two or three years ago but it really changed a game part for an event situation absolutely can you talk about the budget that you have for this yeah so it's I don't have a number for you not a number necessarily but you just put some money behind it again you can you can do it pretty on the cheap but you seem to be deploying some tactics across campus that that take a little more that need a little more money behind them I didn't know if you maybe had done some promoted social posts as well so we haven't done any promoted social posts on what we have kind of done on that side of things that said let's take advantage of our most popular social media accounts knowing that our courage student audiences is following a lot of those counts and make sure that they are sharing the information to get to the site so a little bit of an organic social media advertising in that way well we are really focusing and putting the money that we have toward our those smaller pieces not smaller pieces but those kind of one-off marketing pieces and advertising like I talked those graphics one of the things we add to that one of the things that we did for our incoming students at the the beginning of the semester as we developed a magnet that had all of the information they would need to contact University Police the emergency rooms in in the city our student health our Urgent Care our campus pharmacy our campus mental health facility it was a it was an opportunity for us to give them all of the numbers when those places are open they can stick on their fridge they can put them in there and the residence hall room and and they can always have that with them we gave out I think about 3,500 of those in August and then we had a reprint because a lot of people want them we had our parents club asking if parents could have them as well so we printed another 2,500 and they're getting the amount throughout the rest of the semester and kind of what we've been what we've been told is this is a university priority don't don't overspend but do the types of things that will help to get the information out there so so really that's kind of what we're running with we're putting information in places that they will remember great um you touched on parents and I think you mentioned you that's kind of a next audience to be reaching what are you thinking about about them and the best ways to reach them yes so we we actually have a really great parents Club here at the University and one of the things that we started two years ago was a families of Facebook group for admitted students or admitted parents sorry and that has really changed the way that we can communicate with them and we can start from the time their student is admitted and getting this information out to them so this year we kind of we have a strategy to use that group to get some safety information out there early and often so those questions so at least they know the answer to some questions before their student gets here on campus and then more than anything we know that parents want to be involved more than ever the college search process but also once their student gets here one of the things we always tell them is let there let your student grow up this is what college is all about but we understand that that's just the way that most parents are are these days you know they're telling them that they can sign up for our text alert system that that they can use an app that we caught that we have that's called livesafe where something that our students as well if they're worried about their student safety they can actually use that app to make sure that th ir students are in safe places at certain times and it kind of gives them an idea of where they are so there are options for parents but we've really started to just kind of focus on all right let's make things specifically let's make communications marketing specifically towards parents because their questions and concerns are much different than what we're hearing from students and what we're hearing from equity and staff so they need their own specific answers and and and communication plans behind it absolutely well we're just about out of time so I want to thank you Tony Jodi for joining us from the West Virginia University and thanks as always to our program sponsored PR essays counselors higher education don't forget to follow us on Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn we really appreciate you having joined us for the special edition of hire and live have a great rest of your day