University Business - January 2007 - (Page 55)

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The audiences you need to inform are faculty, staﬀ, and students; prospective students; alumni/donors; elected oﬃcials; and business community/opinion leaders. • Deﬁne and understand potential crises: “If it’s not going to kill the university or damage its business, it’s not really a crisis,” says Caboni. Don’t create a stir over a situation that’s really just a hurdle, he says. Higher ed crises tend to involve administrative scandals, campus violence, date rape, natural disasters, man-made disasters, computer hacks, and sports scandals. • Have a crisis website in place. It should be ready to activate instantly. The site should include links and information for contacting proper authorities. For example, when The Pennsylvania State University has an incident on campus, it launches its e-mail news service with 370,000 subscribers nationwide and in at least 50 foreign countries. The e-mail directs them to the university’s website, where staﬀ can instantly post information or statements from the university’s president. •Test the crisis plan. Annual mock drills can get the job done. Know and utilize your experts. Identify the faculty and staff members who would best make up your experts panel. “The media wants to interview experts who possess the six Ps,” according to Keith Moore of Keith Moore Associates, a higher ed marketing and communications company that hosts an annual conference for PR professionals. “The media appreciates a direct person with simple, straightforward opinions on a topic of wide interest.” These are individuals who have received peer recognition for their work such as winning a Nobel or national prize , hold positions of note, and add perspectives. They have publishings to their credit of chapters or, better yet, books , exude passion in their interviews, and exhibit winning personalities. Moore suggests cataloging experts into a database organized by backgrounds and topics of interest. Be sure to get their permission before placing them in interviews. You may also wish to include media training for experts. Identify media targets for your outreach. Experts will appeal to more than just the local education writer at your hometown paper. You can contact the op-ed editor, features editor, science writer, lifestyle columnist, or sports reporter, as well as other specialists Sage advice: Consultant Keith Moore above suggests media training for school experts, Tim Caboni above left at Vanderbilt U Tenn. says to hire experienced media relations people, and consultant Christopher Simpson left suggests keeping on top of how other schools are handling crises. at local and national publications. Also, pitch stories about your school those reflecting national trends, in particular to the various higher ed media, such as University Business. Develop relationships with reporters. The traditional PR model of faxing press releases and waiting for reporters to bite no longer works. Instead of focusing primarily on packaging the information, get to know members of the media. Through trial and error, you will find out which reporters you can trust to get the story right. Know when to pitch. Find out which times of the year your pitch would be most topical. The annual Chase’s Calendar of Events identifies birthdates and anniversaries of historic and important people and events i.e., National Black History Month, Veteran’s Day, Mental Health Week, etc. WHEN THE NEWS HITS No matter how much you try to anticipate, predict, or prepare for a situation, you can’t always be prepared for what comes your way. Get bad news out fast. “Shorten the life of the news story by getting it out there completely and as soon as it hits,” says Dick Jones of Dick Jones Communications, a media relations consulting company. The College of New Jersey did an exemplary job of handling the tragic death of one of its students, if the feedback Director of Communications Matt Golden has received on campus and “A campus crisis can be precipitated by almost any event, including threats of terrorism, the death of a student, accusations of faculty plagiarism, serious ﬁnancial mismanagement, or a no-conﬁdence vote in a president.” universitybusiness.com —Randall J. Kennedy, Academy Communications January 2007 | 55 Media.indd 55 12/15/06 11:23:29 AM Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0 http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - January 2007

Contents
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Editor's Note
Sense of Place
Stats Watch
People Watch
Viewpoint
Human Resources
Money Matters
Marketing
Financial Aid
Community Colleges
Missed Connections
Escuse Me: Can you Spare a Million?
The Associate
Media Relations Boot Camp
Admissions Administrators Speak Out
Business Technology
What's New
Calendar of Events
Direct Connect
End Note

University Business - January 2007