MMP6: Blogger + Jott = Crisis Communications

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Paula Ganyard: First of all I’m amazed that I got from Chicago without any travel problems and since hotel reservations was canceled when I arrived. You’re presenting at 4:00 and you’re standing in front of happy hour people on Tuesday morning. I guess that’s what I’m paying for going to... So, thanks for being here at this hour. Just give you a little information about me and my university. I’ve been the webmaster at UW Green Bay since 2002. I’ve actually been there since 1997. I come from the Library Science world. I have a Masters Degree in Library Science. I started doing web at a very good school.

“Oh, Paula can do it and I just kind of evolve from there and then realized that I was going to make more money if I went to website than if I stay in the library world so that’s how I ended up where I am. I have been in web services for six years and we do have student webmaster on campus and we do have an outreach about the Green Web Master but I’m responsible for the main level pages for most academic department and variety of special projects in the grant and all that kind of stuff. The university was a fairly young university in comparison to a lot of you probably. We’re in Green Bay, Wisconsin which is way up north, frozen tundra and basically known for the Green Bay Packers and the city that let Brett Farve go. Is anybody a football fan?

But more importantly about 5,900 undergraduates and we’re growing over the next six years to 7,500 students. We have 74% of this year’s freshmen are living on campus which is huge from when I started 1997. We had just barely 50% and we’re known as the suitcase campus, community campus that kind of thing and 65% of our freshmen are first generation college students that are coming this year. So those two numbers to me are important because we have a lot of kids on campus so parents worry about the fact that our campus drive home and our first generation college students to begin with so that’s very different things to that so emergency information is very important for them to know that we will communicate that if we have a problem. What I want to accomplish this afternoon is to give you an idea of our process, the issues that we address.

How we fitted into our emergency plan which I thought was very important. We could just say, “Oh sure we can post anything whatever crisis happens I can change the front page just like that.” But we actually have different levels that I’ll talk about how we set ours up and I will kind of go through it not necessarily exactly step by step but in your handouts which are labeled MMP7 you’ll find in my handout that takes you step by step through setting it up this way if you are interested. Some tips that we’ve kind of learned along the way and time for you to give questions and also I have the answers. So one purpose for our website was that, a place for official communications in the event of an emergency and that is the URLs for our emergency site.

We also hope forward to be the single location where people can go on a regular basis to find information. You can find our emergency plan there. You can find contact information about the dean of students about safety and so on. Not just in the event of emergency but the information is there and check in regular basis if you need to.

Most importantly we needed the communication method in the event that the university was without internet, without power, and or without phone and that’s what I’m going to address in the steps later on. One of the issues we wanted to address on the power outage, or the internet outage. So we know that it shouldn’t be held on campus in the event of we can have emergency website and still sit on the same server in campus website and it goes down and now we have no communication. So we have to make sure that we can host it somewhere else.

Updating in a couple of ways was useful in the event that we have no power so we couldn’t sit down in the computer and go into the blog and post something we need to be able to do something else. Either if you get off campus and you get off campus and get to it a computer where we could do a post, or in this case we’re going to talk about Jott. We’re using it where we could actually make a phone call from a landline or a cell phone. We have iReport 90 and we have the official university voice conducted in the University of Communications in marketing, and the person who’s the head of Crisis Communication in the event that something happens the person was going to be talking to the reader in giving out this is when crisis conference is going to happen if they happen this time. Putting information up at the website actually works in the University of Communications.

So we have different levels of expertise that I have to deal. I can’t just say, “Go in change the spot of the home page.” It has to be simple and quick for them so we have to make sure that we could have it simple so in the event of a crisis they didn’t have to go, “What was that HTML tag again that I was supposed to do to make this thing red or whatever it is.” And in the case of something like Virginia Tech who had a spike of 432 Gigabytes of data on April 16th, we had to make sure we could deal with that and our server was going to be able to handle that kind of a spike. So what we did was we went out to our ISP and are going to use their main pipe one. They go down we are at a bigger problem in Wisconsin and weren’t giving out information about UWGB so our actual site is at emergency.uwgb.edu.    

We’re handling it on the same three levels and are listed in our emergency plan and I’ll take you through those three different levels. But this was a key point because these levels are distinctly different. So your response on the web needed to be along with the same lines. I wasn’t going to take over the front page and say, “We have a water main break,” but I also wasn’t going to have just a short little blurb in the corner of the website or something like alarming trigger on campus.

So at Level One Emergency for us is an incident that will not have serious effect in the overall function of the university such as a sociological crisis of suicide threat something like that, broken water pipe. It’s the keyword there that impacts the university on a limits scope. For us most likely Level One is going to be a winter storm in Green Bay. It’s going to be where we cancel classes, rarely that we do close campus but we have cancelled classes from time to time. So our web response is that one will the have an announcement posted on the inside section of our university main page.

Just to show you our current site. Yeah, too many W’s in there. It’s kind of hard to see it from this side. This is the inside section of we’re referring to here.  

The other one was put in the “What’s Happening” of our current student’s page. In the current student’s page actually for us it’s important that we put it in both spots because if the student logs in on campus, we have it set that the current student’s page is their home page. So we want to make sure that somebody’s on campus and they’re not seeing the main page so they’re getting that information as well, and I would take over right here in the “What’s Happening” section. In the first instance the inside can be posted by University Communications or by the Web Services as well as our network administrator but the most part it’s the University of Communications or myself. In the event that if they’re on campus and they can do it that’s what supposed to be, I’m supposed to be their backup because they’re the one who are making the decision what we are going at. 

The “What’s Happening for the Students” is either the student affair’s webmaster or myself and we will just use the exact same wording that University of Communication does. And we do have some preformatted statements ready to go so that we don’t have to repost it every single time especially for things like the winter storm morning. We do make a distinction between classes cancelled and campus closed you can state if they cancel classes I still have to report to work, or I have to take vacation at this time, or a campus closed then they tell me as we don’t have to be there but we still have to take vacation or sick leave. [Laughter] They’re forcing the second one on us and then tornado warnings which is actually I have it more frequently than I thought when I moved to Green Bay.

Here’s an example and I’ll actually go out and I can go out and show you the site too through up a test version. The preformatted ones they are all the same very basic HTML files from the University of Communications has to do they are all sitting in there particular website, they go in, they find tornadowarning.htm. Copied the text, put it in and include this and pulling it in to this page right here and it’s immediately up on our front page. With the redesign and I did not have the time before coming here as a various spot. I was realizing while the inside is kind of lowdown compared to the old design which had the news over here on the right hand side.

So we’ve got to figure out a way to make sure that those are not list with a kind of low for some folks. A Level Two emergency gets full or lengthy but the key terms there that it may disrupt the overall operations of the university. This is also the point when the emergency management team may get called and they call center might get activated. We have two building on campus.

They’re basically underground. It’s kind of a strange campus. All are really to connect by tunnels on the ground level and two of them are underground. In the center of one them had a dean the call center in the event that building is going to the second will take in where a number of Student Affairs people will come and answer the telephones for anxious parents or whoever are interested in the information that’s coming out about the emergency.

So this is much bigger stuff so the web response here is different though we will do the same thing we did on Level One. Well, the announcement in the inside section and “What’s Happening” in the current student’s page, we will now add into what we call our Feature Section a campus safety alert link, and we also have preformatted announcements. I’ll show you what it looks like in the second. These are the preformatted announcements we have for this level so ‘a bomb threat building evacuation and/or chemical evacuation of campus are put into their own sheltered place. All of them have a little bit of information that we have to modify so we’re evacuating Mary Ann Hobart Hall.

We have to put that into the building evacuation and blank spots for information that we would receive from University Communications will receive from public safety, and enter into those files prior to that level. But it’s not that much in the past to get done as opposed to Level One. So we still have the inside piece of the bottom but we then we taking over with a campus emergency graphic over here. And because our feature rotates every so many seconds it’s actually kind of sort of a little beacon so it might suppose to catch people’s attention but in some point it should look like it flips. It’s a little faster on campus.

And the level three which I hope we never have to get to. This one is a seriously impaired or halted the operations of the university. This definitely will involve the Emergency Management Team. It would definitely have the call center, and ultimately from this level emergency are continuity of operations plan will eventually take over and we’re still in the process of running that plan. Seems to be a very lengthy process for that and I’m hoping in there we would have some information on how we actually bring our website back to normal status very much like Virginia Tech did with there emergency.

There is a little bit of debate on this redirection. At this point, it’s such a series of emergency we want to see nothing else emergency site so we want just immediately have any traffic that’s coming www switched over to emergency. This has to be done by web services mainly by the network administrator that falls under the University Communications wants to have the ability to do that redirection. I kind of do a little twitch when I hear that because sometimes they can’t handle a basic impact.

Audience 1: Is that redirecting traffic that goes to any of the self pages as well?

Paula Ganyard: If we do it on the network conflict server level?

Audience 1: Yes.

Paula Ganyard: University Communications wants to just go in and do this in Fall 07 redirect in the page and that does not do any good and for them to ever know how to get out of the server and so server redirect.

Audience 1: All right.

[Laughter]

Paula Ganyard: It’s just really sends me over. I have problems sometimes when they put its new feature out and the four of us would say like, “You see that doesn’t work.” I can give him a test spot to test them out and start thinking, “Oh if you were just to decide... “Oh, let me see that redirect website today.” And all of the sudden all the traffic [Laughter] is in the other direction.

Audience 2: Well, if you have lost of power and I think that’s crucial.

Paula Ganyard:  Sure. I hope in the event of emergency that they will prove me wrong. I want to be wrong. I want to know that that it will go through exactly is and you could do all these planning and you can have all of these preformatted things. At the moment in time when this happen it’s not going exactly that you’re told to go.

The best you can do would being prepared as you can be for it. Just a few more kind of secondary places that we would put out information. The student affairs webmaster maintains the parent’s blog and our UWGB Facebook page. Also is responsible for UWGB Twitter account.

And I can post to the parent’s blog and Facebook I should have in that University Communications can go into Facebook and do that one as well. It was started in student affairs and that’s kind of co-owned once University of Communications came out more of that social networking piece. And then admission has the power to out information on them on Twitter. But those would all be after the fact that these all goes up.

So how we are setup? First of all we’re hosted in Madison-Wisconsin which is about 150 miles southwest of Green Bay. We’re hosted by WiscNet which is our ISP. I use Blogger for posting announcements using iComputer and it’s being direct post or being used to send an email to Blogger and post that way, and then using Jott for posting announcements to the phone which does voice recognition and it includes a link format text to the recording, and the site is merely available 24/7 and if somebody have a question how much downtime I’m going to have to go double check and get you the answer later.

I know it’s close to this as it possibly can. I put what is Blogger? How many are familiar with Blogger? I’m just going to skip to this so there’s a few.

I put it up because sometimes I’ll be in a session somebody will mention something and I’m thinking, “I may the only one here who doesn’t know this?” So for those who are familiar with it let me just quickly give everyone else caught up. It’s just simple online blogging software. It’s owned by Google so you need a Google account now to go in and create blogs which is a free account. You can do group blogging which is one of the reasons we chose it because we are about eight different people who have the power to go in and blog in event of emergency. And the bigger thing was it allows for FTP because once someone else is server I can’t just go into WordPress which is what we run in campus and I’m a little more familiar with and would like to use.

But we can only put so many types of files on the server on all that kind of things so using Blogger to FTP are posts from the software into WiscNet made the most sense for us. So you’re going to create a Google account and I created a separate one just for the UWGB emergency account for Google and it has nothing but this account on Blogger, and I’ll just show you, you log in to Blogger. This is going to be your dashboard. I just prelogged-in so it won’t ask a lot of password but never been in the front page and easy to get your first blog started and sign up for a Google account all that kind of stuff is there.

Another reason why I had this just for this account because this way it’s the only blog I have to worry about and I have a Google account and got a whole bunch of old blogs in Blogger and I’m trying to find the right one in the emergency and I founded this to be easy plus anyone in web services can go in to this account and use it. I don’t have to worry about having it attached to mine, or in the event that I leave it’s attached to the campus account so you can go in and add a new post. You just see that they edit the post somewhere. These are just some of the posts that are already in there. We have right now the main one and I’ll take you out to the emergency site and second is our current status.

And then other notifications of public safety has typically sent out to the campus in email format or was post to those emails are already being put up here as a post. And then we have all of these drafts and those are again all of those preformatted things in the event of emergency of a certain nature. They could go in, edit that and make it live immediately and save some a little bit of time. A lot of these details is on the handouts and actually give more detail on how to go in and do it but you’re going to give your blog a title in order for UWGB or UW Green Bay Emergency. In my case, I entered my FTP details that was given to me by WiscNet and it’s just stays in there and save and unless something happens at WiscNet I have to change it, it’s good.

And then once I did my first posting and published the entire blog. When I invited through Google, the admin I could go in and invite anyone to join this blog as part of that group blogging and that they would have to have a Google account to go in and set it up and they will have access to go in and quote. Normally if I’m administrating the blog and people want to quotes they just kind of an author level site here because someone in University Communications, when they put up a post initially when I go out and speak to the chief of police or whoever. Get more information and call back to the office Mike saying, “Nancy, we changed that post I just put up there and say this?”

With the administrator privileges Nancy can now go change Mike’s post so everybody has administrator privileges in Blogger which doesn’t throw me but it gets the job done that we need to face. And I’ll get to Jott in a second. The different settings for those who have not seen Blogger before

Audience 3: Did you say all of those are redefining blog posts, you can just create it anytime?

Paula Ganyard: Yes.

Audience 3: You just tried it and activate it?

Paula Ganyard: Sure. You just save your draft format and then when they’re activated, you get that moment in time stamp. So in this page you have the title and different types of settings. Again, a lot of those settings, I have in my handout so you don’t take a lot of time in going through them. The publishing tab is sitting in there with my FTP information, what server it’s going to go and the credentials I need to get in to that server and so on.

And then the big thing was you can use a blog. Blogger has a number of templates and preformatted versions. You kind of start with one of those and modify it so we came into here modified all of this type of information. And all of our files sit down the server in Madison so any image, any style sheet the PDFs to all of the different emergency procedures and so on reside at Madison.

It makes no sense if our site goes down. It will no longer go back to our site you get that information so we house that up here. So this is what the site currently looks like right now. If you have our current status which is where there are no emergencies everything just cool in Green Bay which is good to know.

Please don’t run emergency on the presentation. Some basic phoning information over here. We have lots of different emergency information is where I said we’re keeping all of that kind of information up here as well so we have a whole guide. We have the entire emergency plans, or if you would like to see how were to respond to any one of those types of emergencies that’s up there various actions, there’s even a PDF version of this little procedures. 

We have campus maps up here as well. The one part that we’re going to be adding more to this contact information, we have most of them it’s being reviewed this dean of students want other people to be up there and so on. I was supposed to add information, some quick facts about the university to our administration.

Information with the medium they want in the event regular site is down that have to get from the University Communications and hopefully that will go out in the next month or so. Any questions on the Blogger or part it you can go ahead and post, ones is ready to go anytime.

Audience 4: Just the actual message that is being pulled into the includes. Are you FTPing that file to WiscNet and then your page is pulling it in?

Paula Ganyard: All of the way the website looks?

Audience 4: Yeah.

Paula Ganyard: That whole stuff comes out of Blogger and Blogger posts all of those things.

[Cross-talk]

Audience 4: How far have you been gong to the HTML code, about the blog search function and all that.  

Paula Ganyard: If your FTP yes it does. It stays on Blogger and that header has to stay on. It’s kind of a hidden thing so if you can find it, let me know. It's like at the bottom of the many settings so just kind of unlock the fact that you don’t want a Blogger type. And then we also go in and modify the Blogger template so go look for the stylesheets on the same server that eventually publishes everything to anyway so all of those links are in there with the full URL to our emergency site. Also one thing I have in here in case somebody has been wondering in the event that our DNS Server goes down, we actually have a duplicate in Milwaukee and Madison for redundancy as far as it goes down and we can get to it. If we can then we go there.

So how many have heard of Jott? OK, a few less. According to Jott, this is what they say, “Jott captures thoughts, creates to-dos, sets reminders with several phone calls.” Well, this is just what I needed.

You know people say, “Well, I’m in the shower when I think of this idea." Well, I usually drive at home, or I’m driving from some place and some place. “Oh, I got to remember that, or I just turned 40 a week and a half ago and I don’t, so I thought this is the best I can use. Call Jott, it will send me an email.

What was I have to call Jott? “Oh, yeah thank goodness that I thought of that. At first when it was Beta everything about it was free and I’ll talk about their plans. But it is a voice-to-text recognition. I call then I’ll do that kind of stuff and it will be posted up, attached out to a server.

It recognizes my voice. Translates it into text, and for the most part, it’s very good. If you’re somewhere extremely noisy or if you’re been out too late tonight and you’re trying to do a Jott and slurring your speech so for the most part it’s been pretty much dead on. It might spell some of these names wrong I would say ‘Kathy’ and maybe it does it with a C instead of a K or something like that but it’s been really good every time that we tested it.

It sends you an email. If you’re using the free account it just sends you an email that you did a Jott. Higher levels that actually send you what it was you said, or you can send emails to other people. You can create to-do lists, and you can post information to blogs.

You can post to Twitter, that type of thing. These are the three different levels that Jott has. This is the same thing that’s done on their website www Jott.com. You can see their plans.

This presentation was accepted and like a week later Jott changes their plans and I’m like [Laughter] and I had to quickly go in there to find out that the way we are using it for our website the Jott Base which is free still works for us. So we didn’t actually have to pay anything to do it. We give 15 seconds now which it used to be 30 but we can do unlimited so we could have to text every 10 minutes or whatever for three days if we need to. You’ll get in daily email with ‘you Jotted this, this, and with links out to Jott to go see what they were.

When it first came out I could get my car and get going and say OK Jott actually dictate my email and it will just send off to Top that’s now a paid service. The free Jott links in this case Blogger, Twitter, and there’s like three or four others are what they consider a free Jott link, and that’s a link from Jott to another one of their services. The Premium services are things like Remember The Milk, Google Calendar, and another 24 different types of services a lot of them and when I looked at the list like, “God, that was 75% of these things are. You can those if you go for one or the other.

You can do Jott Express which is an application that you download on your desktop. If you have Jott for the iPhone and you have others, or the paid services you can get a Jott feed. I did write to Jott for this presentation and those stuffs we did out.

But I told them how we are using it and they said, “Well, that’s one of the better voice heard.” And I asked this, “Would you have educational pricing in the event that I need one 15 seconds that I don’t have to keep phoning back?” They said, “They don’t have a different pricing right now but they do have a different packages that are coming out before the end of the year and thought of it might fit in to what we will need.” So figure out how Jott is supposed to be coming out with new prices by the end of the year. Well, let me show you how this works and I’m going to have to do this.

There’s an 866 number. You create an account by going to Jott.com and set up by your landline or a cell phone. The accounts are per phone number. So told University Communications you have a cell phone, set one up there.

If you think you’re going to use it on your office phone set that one up as well, and then you call this 866 number. It’s out of their site but it’s a free phone number. I’ll get to that part. When you call this woman from says, “Who do you want to Jott.”

And then you say the name that you set up in your system. So if I want to Jott to Twitter, I say Twitter it goes to Jott to my Twitter account. If I want to Jott to in this case Emergency site that I have made in emergency and it goes to connect to that Blogger account. Once it publishes to Blogger, Blogger then says, “Hey, I have something new I need the FTP.   

Operator: “Who do you want to Jott?”

Paula Ganyard: “Emergency.”

Operator: “Sorry, this is not a Jott name for contacts. For help say, “Help.”

Paula Ganyard: “Emergency”

Operator: “Sorry, this is not a Jott name for contacts. For help say, “Help.”[Laughter] “Sorry, this is not a Jott name for contacts. For help say, “Help.” “Sorry, this is not a Jott name for contacts. For help say, “Help.”

Paula Ganyard: “Emergency”

Operator: “Emergency? Is this correct?”

Paula Ganyard: Yes.

[Beep]

This is a test of the emergency system. It’s only a test.

Operator: Got it! To re-record press 3 or wait the record of Jott.

Paula Ganyard: And they’ll just ask me, “Who do you want to Jott?” So I need to end the call. It takes depending on how long my message is. Something like this should show up here in the next 30 to 60 seconds in Blogger and will be up there.

Others take me a little longer. I specifically take a pause in that first a little bit because it takes so many of the words and they do the title of my quote and it will do the rest. Let’s see, it’s probably too soon. In the meantime, we’ll go back to it when we talk about this.

When you’re setting this up for the very first time, it’s easier to have both your Blogger and your Jott account all at the same time because Jott is going to require the Blogger says, “Do you want to make disconnection?” And so they’re two windows open and this will do the connection for you. I named my link ‘emergency’ because if I wanted to have another Blogger account let’s say Blogger I got to have different names. There’s a 17 digit number that you get from Blogger and this you just kind of hover over one of the links. Your Blog ID number shows up down here and that’s where you get your 17 digit number that you need to put into Jott. I have too much time. There’s the number and I have five minutes.

Everyone needs to have a phone number as I said. You can also in Blogger set up an email account would have somebody has to do with email ‘UWGBemergency.email list’ wherever you want to put in there. In your settings there’s an empty spot that you could put in text to create this email address that you’ve been used to post to Blogger. The one key though is regardless of who has permission to that site, if they know that email address they can post to your. So you want to make sure that that’s kind of kept confidential and if you let somebody leave to change it but you’ll find it under the email settings tab.  

These are my tips so we can get to your questions if you have. Define your own responsibility. It’s really important that I know that University Communications is good in XYZ and I’ll take care of ABC. Train the staffs especially if they’re not used to doing one stuff.

The people in the University Communications are very good in what they do but not necessarily web experts so I can’t either be the one to do their jobs so for me it’s important to give them clear documentation so that they could do this in the event of an emergency. Also that extra information up there like I said and have stuff in case the media needs it. Test the site part of your emergency drill. We have an emergency drill in June and this site was activated and we will use it every time we do some sort of an emergency drill. 

We have mandatory fire drills and tornado drills all those kinds of things and the site will be used for that and then publicized the URL. See if we had success here. It never takes this long. Yeah and if it shows up in Blogger it should have just shown up right here on the.

This one might be an example of it. When you activate this one but it will do the same thing eventually and I have to remember to go in here and put it down.  So it puts up exactly what I said and then it has a link to Jott where you can actually hear what I said in case it comes out as garbled speech.

Murphy’s Law, you know we’re presenting everything can go wrong. All right, any other questions? I’m sorry I can’t raise it. My handouts go through every step. Thanks. So here is one of the old ones that I did and you can click on listen and it will go out to Jott for you. You click on the play and you can actually hear that 15 seconds. Thanks.

[Applause]

Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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