How Colleges Handle Emergency Alerts for 60,000+ People | Campus Safety & Crisis Communication

In this episode of The Alerting Authority, hosts Jeannette Sutton and Eddie Bertola sit down with Stuart Moffatt, Director of Emergency Management at the University of Utah, to explore the unique challenges of campus emergency communication, public safety planning, and crisis response in higher education.

From football games with 60,000 fans to healthcare operations, research facilities, student housing, and active threat preparedness, Stuart explains how the University of Utah functions like a city within a city — and what it takes to keep that population informed and safe.

The conversation dives into:

• Emergency management in higher education
• Campus alert systems and SMS emergency notifications
• Active threat communication strategies
• Standard Response Protocol (SRP) implementation
• Warning Lexicon research and protective action messaging
• Crisis communication for students, faculty, staff, patients, and visitors
• Event safety planning for college football and large public gatherings
• Lessons learned from COVID-19 response operations
• Building trust in emergency alerts and public safety systems

Stuart also shares his fascinating journey from multimedia design and software development into emergency management after Hurricane Katrina inspired a career change.

Whether you work in emergency management, higher education, public safety, or crisis communications, this episode offers practical insights into modern alerting strategies and the future of campus preparedness.

Subscribe for more conversations on emergency alerts, crisis communication, disaster preparedness, and public safety leadership.

#EmergencyManagement #CampusSafety #CrisisCommunication #UniversityOfUtah #PublicSafety #EmergencyAlerts #HigherEducation #AlertingAuthority #WarningLexicon #EmergencyPreparedness

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hi, I'm Jeanette Sutton.

SPEAKER_02 0:09

And I'm Eddie Bertol.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

And we welcome you to another episode of the Alerting Authority. And as always, we encourage you to subscribe, follow, listen, and most importantly, participate in these podcasts. We want your questions, concerns, ideas, problems, pain points, and success stories so we as alerting authorities can better do our jobs and make our communities safer. And today's podcast is brought to you by the Warn Room. If you have 360 characters to save a life, are you ready? I am Dr. Jeanette Sutton, and at the Warn Room, we turn disaster science into life-saving action. If your agency is struggling to craft the perfect alert, we are here to help you get it right the first time. We offer specialized warning boot camps to shar sharpen your team's skills, expert consulting for crisis message development, and access to the warning lexicon, a plug and play library of evidence-based templates for nearly 50 hazards. Stop guessing and start alerting with confidence. Visit thewarnroom.com to book a training or explore our message libraries. At the Warn Room, you get expertly crafted alerts for a safer world.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

And I fully endorse that. So give us a call, please. Um I am really looking forward to our guest here, and I'm excited to introduce him because it's it's someone we've tried to come on and get on before. And he is just so hard to book because he is so busy doing so many things. Um, but he carved out a little bit of time for us today. Um so I want to present you a little bit about his bio and introduce you to him. So Stuart Moffitt serves as the director of emergency management at the University of Utah, where he leads efforts to prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies across one of the most dynamic environments in public safety. With responsibility for a large and diverse campus, Stewart's work spans beyond traditional emergency management. His role includes planning for incidents that impact not only students and staff, but also visitors, contractors, healthcare facilities, and large-scale events. The university presents a unique operational landscape because it functions like a city within a city, where coordination, communication, and preparedness account for constant population changes, complex stakeholder needs. And Stuart brings a practical, real-world approach to emergency management. He focuses on how to effectively communicate with diverse audiences, dynamic populations. And I am truly just excited to hear from him. So I want to say, welcome, Stuart. And and again, I as I've stated before, I am a fan of schools there. And I think we may talk about that in just a little bit, but welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 3:06

Thank you, Eddie. Thank you, Jeanette. It was great to finally connect with the both of you.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Yeah. And we know that you have a very busy week with having just finished commencement. And congratulations to graduating your youngest and getting ready for a big giant national event this coming weekend. So your phone may be dinging with alerts that the dirt has arrived for the stadium and the motocross riders are arriving soon.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Yeah, dirt, dirt's already in, but the dinging is just sort of last-minute planning elements. I did silence my phone, so hopefully we're okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

It's the life of a busy emergency manager, I think that all of our listeners can understand. And it would be odd not to have the dinging in the background for some of them. So your bio is wonderful, but I know that you have a much more storied past because you had these different pathsways that you took before you arrived at Utah. Because I've talked with your former advisor, Tom Tkova, about this, and he is a big fan of yours as well. Um, so tell us about your journey into emergency management. How did you end up working as a director of emergency management at the University of Utah?

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Well, we could spend an hour, and you get me talking about that. So cut me off and redirect me as you need to, right? Um, I think in my cohort, my age range, a lot of emergency managers have come from other areas. And probably that's different now for the next generation of emergency managers. A lot of them are coming out with undergrads and emergency management services and other things. But my story is a little bit more attached, maybe not to the very old school. I came from fire after 40 years. Here's my version of it. I started my college experience in drawing and painting, fine arts major. So go figure, right? And uh did that for a little bit, had a lot of fun doing it. It's one of my passions, but realized I wasn't going to make money. So I got into this thing called multimedia design back in the late 90s. That led to an internship at a hardware company, a computer hardware company. They wanted creative, but they wanted technical. And I did that for a number of years. And over the next 10 to 15 years, I basically went into webmastering, web design, and then eventually got tapped for software design at a company because of my web experience. And so I had a full career in software design for telecommunications back in my hometown of Ottawa, Canada. And then this moment happened. It was Hurricane Katrina 2005. I had lived in southern Louisiana as a missionary for my church. And so those were my people in the early 90s. And I saw, I think I saw on the news on CNN, one of the places where I lived that had become underwater as a result of the levee break. And so it just got the work, the wheels churning. I didn't ever get that drawing and painting degree. And my wife had always said, you should go back to school, you should do something, right? So for that summer and into that fall, it was the churn of what if what if I went into emergency management? I've got a lot of technical skill. Maybe I could like leverage that into the EM world. I was a little bit naive that I might be the only technologist or some revolutionary technologist in EM. And to do that, I decided to go to school. And I looked across both countries, Canada and the U.S., and I found the University of Utah. I found Tom Kova's Center for Natural and Technological Hazards at the time. There was also a degree program where I could create my own degree. There were natural hazards and some DHS-focused emergency management, but more on the terrorism side. And I wasn't huge on that. I was more natural hazards, but I also wanted to have this computer science integration somehow. And so I came to the University of Utah and designed my own undergraduate degree, which meant finding an advisor. I found Tom Koba in geography, going before a committee of, I think, 15 or 20 different advisors, and spec out my whole four-year undergraduate degree. These were the courses and these were the pathways, and then did that. Lucky to have Tom on my side. He was very supportive. In fact, we published together and he gave me a first author on one of the papers that we worked on together that ended up being my honors thesis at the end of that undergrad. During that time, I got to intern with the staff side of the house, environmental health and safety. The director there was Marty Schaub, one of my mentors. And she hired me to help with a project and eventually became the project manager, technical manager for a Hazas study, so an earthquake study of buildings on campus. We were kind of refreshing that study from about 20 years previously. So did that, had a great time, graduated, went on to DC, back to Canada. And then Marty called me and said, I've got a spot open. Would you like to come back? So in 2010, came back to Utah and started as a halftime emergency manager. And the other half of the time to kind of make up the salary difference was overseeing HR and IT for that department. And my boss, Marty, she was halftime EM and halftime directing environmental health and safety. That partnership lasted for a number of years until 2016, when one of the vice presidents moved the portfolio of emergency management from EHS into public safety. So reporting to the chief of police. That brought the program to full two full-time emergency managers. I was still an associate director. They hired a new director who could speak to speak for police work. And we worked together for five years, including during COVID. And boy, that was a great time. His name was Jeff Gravit, awesome guy, another mentor. So I've had this series of mentors that that brought me through the system until uh I think it was 2023 that I became the full-time director. There was a little interim period in there. So lots of experiences, lots of opportunities to do lots of different things in the whole career. I feel really uh blessed that I've had sort of two really fruitful careers that I've enjoyed.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

I think it's funny. I think that people now say experts in career development, career paths say that our generation and the next generation behind us are going to have multiple careers. And I mean, who knows what your next career will be if you don't stay in what you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Yeah, I've I've got this window 2034. Uh the Olympics are coming to Salt Lake City. And uh I think maybe uh that might be the swan song if I can hang on long enough and then kind of you know ride off into the sunset of retirement after that.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

And is FIFA coming to Utah this year, summer also?

SPEAKER_00 10:27

Uh there are some, I think there are some camps. We're not one of the sites. Okay. Um, but but I think there are a couple of s uh campsites nearby, but uh I'm not involved with those.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Okay. Thank goodness. You got enough on your plate. No, that's pretty good already.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

Yeah. Well, I think you're gonna help dispel a rumor here with this next one. Because I think when people think, and I know this is again for anybody who's worked at the city, county, state level emergency management, the university is different. And this is where I I would love to get some thoughts and feedback because in from your perspective, what are the biggest distinctions in how you plan, coordinate, or execute compared to the traditional? Because what I don't want is someone to think, well, the school year's done, he's done, type of thing. Oh, you do football games and graduations and check the box.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Yeah. It it's so different. And I'm I'm super biased because this has been kind of the one and only big gig in EM. Uh, but I've seen, I've got a lot of close counterparts in the city and the county and the state, and I see and appreciate what they do every day. I don't know if I could survive in in those roles because there is so much, as you mentioned in the opener, so much diversity happening on campus. People, events, uh, different cycles through the through the school year, right? You've got housing move in in late August, the start of the semester, all of the academic cycles that happen, and then you've got the special event cycle. So as indicated, we we close up graduation. Great. Now we're into special events at the stadium, including concert series, supercross, monster truck, and then we get into football. And along that path, you still have to maintain your regular cadence of training, exercise, plan writing, all of those things. So it feels like on any given day, I can come into the office and I'm just not gonna be in this one box of like planning specialist three, right? Which is kind of at the federal level, like, oh great, that those can be fun and rewarding, but you're probably not doing a lot of different things. And my personality, I really thrive on doing a lot of different things. And uh there's a there's a lot of that at the university. Um, some of the some of the biggest challenges, I guess, or or maybe distinctions, is our audience. Um we're we're planning and doing training, coordination with uh I I think there's like five basic audiences. We've got students, faculty, staff, patrons to our special events or just visitors to campus. And then in healthcare, we've got our patients there as well. So that's uh part of the challenge. I I'll correct a little bit of the opener, Eddie. You mentioned healthcare facilities. There's actually another emergency management team that is in U of U Health, and they take care of everything patient care. But they are one of our liaisons that work into our overall emergency management team or incident management team rather. And uh we we support each other. Uh my unit is the alerting authority on campus. So if he's got something going that is just healthcare, I'll dip into his uh leadership team and offer alerting support. Likewise, if he's if I've got something going on and I need healthcare support, then he can come in and support that way. So if you look at uh a normal municipality, local state or county, it feels like they've got maybe one or two things going, right? They've got the residents, they've got their own employees, maybe they've got some special jurisdictions that they liaise with once in a while, and it's mostly planning. Whereas we've got all of those things, we've got academics, so that mission of student success. We've got uh special events going on that are mostly retail oriented, it's patrons coming. Uh, we've got academic or sorry, yeah, uh research happening as well. That's a big component of the University of Utah, and then healthcare. Uh we've got uh institutes on campus, uh Latter-day Saint Institute. So we've got churches, schools, businesses, all kinds of other operations that are running, and that I think lends to the diversity. So the challenge is when you're trying to run a program, and especially in communications, how do you speak to all of those different audiences in a one-shot alert? It can be challenging. And uh safety means different things to different people sometimes, depending on which demographic they're sitting in. And the the great challenge is communicating well to all of them equally.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

That is a huge challenge. And that was actually the next question is how do you do that? And you've got your students and your staff and your visitors and healthcare and patrons, and then families and institutes, contractors, rival fan bases, you never know what they're gonna stir up. How how do you how do you manage emergency preparedness and communication when you have all of these different audiences and they're they're constantly changing? Like every day there's new groups of people arriving on campus.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Well, the key is you can't do it without a team. And so if if you think of all these areas that you just mentioned, that I just mentioned, there are staff members who are basically managing those relationships on a daily basis anyway, right? Uh, the the venue, uh, our Rice Eccles Stadium, there's a whole team there that manages contracts and venue operations during uh any of the special events, including our athletic events. So where my skill comes in is leveraging those subject matter experts and understanding how they're commuting, communicating to their clientele and then trying to leverage a safety message on top of that. So, for instance, uh in the stadium, pre-game or pre-show, there's always an evacuation video that plays. That that they develop that because that's part of their venue requirements. But now I can add to that and say, all right, if we do have an evacuation, here's a graphic that I would like to go up on the big board so that people know where they can get text messages from, especially if they're unaffiliated to the university. They can short code into a text messaging system and we can communicate with them. We try to do that on the front end, whether it's through general marketing, maybe some A, we've tried A-frames in the past. Hey, sign up for these texts. Really, people are going to get it when the emergency happens. So we depend on the operation that's front and center to the client, in this case, the stadium, but that's true for student activities. They have student orgs and a whole set of staff that help the students have their own activities. And we try to provide subject matter expertise for that. How do your students prefer to get alerts? They don't they don't use apps, right? I think there's an apps question uh tools that actually work later on. So talking to those subject matter experts informs how we can best communicate and interact with them. I hope I hope that kind of answered that question.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

It does. And I can imagine, I can imagine watching it in process of the constant communication, the relationships that have been built in order to make it successful. Um, and then having these tools at your fingertips because you've planned and prepared ahead of time to make it so that it's possible to communicate to these different populations.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

And I'll add to that there's no silver bullet on that. Um, you you do your best at planning, but there are there are just natural challenges. For instance, here's a challenge with the scoreboard, right, at a football game. Because of the television production, almost every millisecond of that board is planned out. And so, you know, you would think, oh, gee, couldn't you put that message on for signing up for campus alerts? Couldn't you put that on in the first quarter at some point? Well, no, because there are just so many things going on for the TV production. You don't get screen time. But I do get screen time if the ref stops the game because of a lightning strike. All right, so we've got a plan for that. And our venue and our security and our police and EMS and fire all know that plan. But now I need to communicate quickly to the patrons. Now I can do that by putting that short code up on the board, and people can get in that way, and we can tell them when game resumption is happening. And that's true for concerts and other venues as well.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Yeah. You're you're kind of like the National Weather Service when it issues a tornado alert and you're breaking into the broadcast.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

A little bit.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Like, can I can I put my scrolling message across the middle of the football field?

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Right. Can I fly a plane and and have some kind of trailing banner that says right up here for campus alerts? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:56

You're close to Hill Air Force Base, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Yeah, that's much further north.

SPEAKER_02 20:02

Oh, it's further north, but in an F-35, how long does it take, really? Right. Yeah. Whether we do some sky riding, you know. YC for the sky. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Yeah, we we can contract with Hill for the sky riding.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

We'll just do a little little something because like we're we'll transition to your tool question, because you brought it up, and I think it's it's a really good question because your populations that you identified and you said it right, right? They have different ways that they're gonna look for information, consume information, where they're gonna seek it. And so while there are a lot of tools, um, if we look at the opt-in platforms, um, and it could be apps that you said, you know, people may not use or social media, um, or if there are things they're automatically signed in to or signed up for as a student or faculty, um, from your experience, what are the primary tools or channels that you use that you think are the most effective for getting that critical information out quickly to all the different populations and stakeholders that you mentioned?

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Yeah, great question. We tried it all, right? In in 15, 20 years here, we've done it all. And and a good analogy, remember back in COVID days where we said to protect yourself, it's really a Swiss cheese method, right? The the layering of you've got social distancing, you've got masks, you've got vaccinations, you've got washing your hands, all of those things. We approach the communication pathways kind of the same way. It's a Swiss cheese. We'll do everything we can in every mode that we can, but no, no one mode is hitting everybody perfectly all the time. However, I will say that SMS technology is the best, quickest way to communicate, especially in a crisis before, but also especially in the crisis. And how that landscape has changed over the last few years, it used to be that we were. Stuck in 160 characters. In fact, if I go back to uh the FEMA Prep Talk from oh gee, his name just escaped me. Yes, thank you. Yes, Dennis Belletti's FEMA Prep Talk. The warning system of the future, right, that he talked about was more than 100 and whatever characters. We're living in that future today. I can send a longer text message. I can send a text message with a dynamic URL that has more information in it when the person just one clicks through and lands on a page with maybe additional protective actions or more specificity. So the the tech has changed quite a bit. We'll still use social media when appropriate, but I have found that uh the brand of the institution is managed differently on different platforms. If there's a really big deal, we're gonna hit them all. But I'm not gonna use, for instance, Instagram for uh an alert. Uh there could be maybe something on the used Twitter or even their Facebook, but people aren't looking at Instagram for that. I wish it was different. I wish I could just hit all the platforms all of the time. But generally speaking, email is just a little bit too slow. It's good in some cases for things like cleary notifications that require communication, but aren't immediately life safety choices that uh the recipient needs to make. Whereas SMS, I need you to do this protective action now, I can hit that now. I will say this too. Uh we have we have swung the pendulum a couple of times over the last two decades about whether we're opt-in or opt-out. We are now opt out again, which is good, but you also need to direct that funnel for people to make those choices. And generally speaking, if we can direct more people to that page, more of them will choose to stay in rather than opt out, which is which is how it should be. And I think that's kind of the national standard. So uh we're at that place now, which is good. We also, as I kind of mentioned when we're talking about football, uh the vendor that we use provides for shortcut URLs that we can put on QR codes or short short links. And we can have patrons to special events who are unaffiliated with the university, don't have a chance to go in and register or opt in. They can also get messages if they just click that one-time QR code. So because the tech landscape has changed, our Swiss cheese layer is getting better and better and better. But I did hear from one of our students recently. Uh, she was a presidential intern and she was assigned to public safety. She did her year-end report. Uh, she was graduating, finishing. And uh we got to QA a little bit after her report, and she'd done some great work on identifying with a map out on the street, like around campus, where do you feel safe, where do you not feel safe, and identified a lot of locations that we knew and supported our uh research as well. And I just asked her, how did how do students prefer critical messaging? And I said, Do they use apps? And she said, No, they don't. But uh they like SMS. And so that that that supports my my thinking. But I also heard that they would like SMS for uh not just in the critical emergency for just learning about what protective actions are. They prefer SMS for that. I've always viewed SMS as it's the big red button, and I'm only going to press it when it's super critical and it's life safety right now. I'm hearing from from her, at least in her research, that it might also include other opportunities to communicate. Now, I just kind of dissed apps for a second. I I do want to tell a success story about an app that was launched recently here at the U. It's called Utah 360. And uh, there's a vendor, and we've white-labeled it, and it started in athletics for ticket sales. But the manager who's running that program uh on behalf of the university isn't just looking at it as athletics only. And so now uh she is reaching out into many other groups around the university, including in housing and in student uh student groups, that they can have their own space within that app. And so we've talked to her quite a bit. We've got some safety information in there already. We've also plugged in our campus alert system to that app. And so now when I send out an alert, it's just as easy as clicking a button, and that goes to, I think she's in the tens of thousands of users. So the stickiness based on cool events, right? Uh, concerts, uh football, other special student events is providing yet another layer in the Swiss cheese where I can get alerts to that population as well. Does every student use it? No. Does every staff member use it? No. But it's another layer where I can get the message out when I need to.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

I think that's fantastic. There's so many different channels that you have at your fingertips. And when we talk with our um government agencies, we frequently focus on wireless emergency alerts. Um and you don't have that as part of your toolkit, but you do have so many other things. And because you can opt your population in, you've already got access to them, which is which is very similar to a wireless emergency alert.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Yes and no. I mean, it doesn't have 100% coverage like a WiiA does because it it is either the opt-in or opt-out. Um, but it's it's way more dialed in than a WIA. We we don't do wireless emergency alerts because our campus geography is so tight that if we hit one of the cell towers, uh, it would spill into the surrounding city and the neighborhoods. And so we would only request the county to send that if our incident was actually spilling into those areas as well. So county runs those IPAUS and Wii alerts, and and I've got a good relationship with them. We can we can do it if we need to, but we didn't become our own IPAUS alerter because of that reason. We just day to day we're not gonna hit uh the reasons for that as often. If I really need it though, because we've got major routes coming through campus, if we need it for people who are just driving by and and there's a major thing going on, we can reach to the county and and the spillover at that point then is is acceptable.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

Yeah, well, it you know, thinking about city, county, state government, that's where a lot of our research lives in terms of how to alert effectively. And um, you know, messaging on campuses is an understudied area. And you and I have talked about that.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Um so as you've thought about how to design your messages so that they are effective, what are the strategies that you you have used to make sure that your messages are understandable and actionable, given that your context is a little bit different?

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Yeah. Great question. And and this is a bit of a lead-in to the conversations that we've had for the last year. So a couple of things are happening in Utah right now that are unique and are kind of, well, not kind of, they are converging on this ability to communicate, particularly protective actions. The first is that for a couple of years, the legislature, a couple of years ago, the legislature enacted the standard response protocol for K-12. So SRP from the I Love You Guys Foundation with five easy to understand remember protective actions. Don't really talk about the hazard, but talk about the protective actions supported by regular drills in the K-12 environment. Great program. Nationally, uh working with my colleagues nationally. Uh, how do you do SRP in higher ed because it's so different? And I was kind of against it for a long time, uh, but there was movement in Utah, particularly since the Charlie Kirk assassination at one of our sister institutions last fall, that there should be this common way to express critical actions, protective actions in a critical incident. And so those conversations started to happen. And I was really kind of uh uh poking the problems of just standard SRP and higher ed. At the same time, Jeanette, you'll remember that we brought you in where it was when I was wearing another hat as the chair of the University and Colleges Caucus of the International Association of Emergency Managers. We brought you into a webinar to talk about the warning lexicon. And after that, then we brought you to Utah to do that for us in a workshop basis, right? So we've got this disclosure, we've got this background in our relationship going into this interview today. But those two things converged for me in a way that solved a lot of the uh of the problems that I've seen in the last 20 years. You have to communicate simply, but in higher ed, you have to communicate with purpose so that adults making those decisions about what do I do with this message have enough information to make a decision and get to the protective action quickly. This again is sort of the fulfillment of Dr. Melletti's idea that if you can reduce the delay and protective action, then you can increase life safety. So merging these two has been kind of my mission uh since uh late fall and just presented at our campus safety summit on that idea, and we are rolling out programs now to show our campus that are, again, our students, faculty, staff, patrons, patients, all of those people can hear and understand the basic protective actions of SRP, uh, supported by the uh very declarative directive messages that are written in the warning lexicon model. We've integrated that. It's in our templates in our campus alert system. We're working on placards to put around campus for SRP. We're doing some online training that can support all of that as well.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

That's fantastic. I I love hearing when people are taking the research and applying it in these really practical ways. So for anyone who wants to have access to the warning lexicon, it is freely available. FEMA paid for that research, and we use some of that money to make make it open access. So if you you can get it from my website on the warnroom.com, but you can also go to bit.ly uh forward slash warning lexicon and it'll come up and you can just download it. And I think it's been downloaded over 18,000 times now. Oh, that's cool. I know it's it's pretty amazing. Um, and I it's it's just really an amazing opportunity to to have an impact. Can you say a little bit more about the standard response protocol? Because it is it is a little bit different from like a natural hazard, technological hazard. I mean, we're talking about active threat when we're talking about standard response. We're talking an active threat like active shooter, active assailant. There's some sort of an activity where people are in danger, right? Or it does standard response protocol cross all hazards?

SPEAKER_00 34:11

It it does, it is an all hazards model because it's it's not based on hazard, it's based on protective action. They are actions that, again, are are based on uh a child understanding them, right? So you've got five basic protective actions. Hold, secure, lock down, evacuate, shelter. They've got what SRP, what I love you guys calls the term of art. So those are the words I just read you. But then there are directives. For instance, hold is the term of art, stay in your room or area is the directive. And this was the crux of the problem when I was trying to apply this in higher ed. This works really well in a built environment where there's a small footprint like an elementary school, right? One building, maybe two buildings, uh, controlled access, regular schedule. Everybody goes to lunch at the same time, they go to PE at different times, but the system inside of a K-12 school is different than a large open campus with hundreds of buildings, lots of people coming and going, uh, patient care and these special events. And some of the directives didn't line up very well. It became very hard to say, uh let's take one area in the student union, and there is a medical event happening in the lobby, that would be a hold typically. And it would be a first responder, hey, hold, stay in your room or area because we're dealing with this in the lobby. Well, how do I put that hold message out in a campus alert for the entire building? That doesn't make sense. If I'm in the other end of the building and these are large buildings, why would I be holding if there's just a medical event in the lobby? So that one is probably not an alert. I've got an alert for it just in case we ever need to use it, but it's the education of hey, not everything has to be an alert. It could be a directive from fire or EMS, or it could be a directive from the front desk staff in that building. Hey, everybody, just hold here. You know, somebody needs an AED, somebody's have they've sprained an ankle or something and fallen. Let's wait till emergency responders come in. That's how a hold would work in K-12. These other ones, though, secure, lockdown, evacuate shelter, the complexity of the problem just grows and grows and grows because our built environment is different and because our audience is different. You'll notice that in general SRP for K-12, we're not telling the kids what the hazard is. But you know from warning Lexicon, if you can describe the hazard and the hazard impact, that will get somebody to the protective action more quickly. So we have uh one of our templates for the active shooter scenario is you may be shot or killed. Like that is the hazard impact. When I first pitched that to my leadership, there were a lot of like raised eyebrows, like, we really want to say that. And I said, Well, let me show you the research and tell you why. Because we need not to be ambiguous when we send the alert. If we just send lockdown and no description of where, why, how to do that, and we're missing the people are just going to start asking questions and they're gonna be stuck in the confusion, and then the delay to the protective action gets longer. So we've we've run through this with each of our hazards that are the highest uh probability, well, highest impact and highest probability, and we think we've got something. There's always room to adjust it in the moment when you have that information, but otherwise we can just go. I should mention, too, that the other program, if you will, uh we've moved moved from run hide fight for active shooter to avoid, deny, defend. And our legislature put on aid. That was about the same time that SRP went into K-12. And so we've changed that in our higher ed uh institution. And we think the recommendation will probably go statewide as well. There are reasons that the the wording is different. I won't get into all of those unless you want to discuss it. But if we train that way and if we alert that way, and we're giving people reasons to take action based on those trainings and those alerts, I think we'll have a much safer uh institution and environment for us.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

I really appreciate you giving us the examples because in this case, really clearly explaining how these systems are fitting together is really vital because they there could be some confusion about well, how exactly are you applying this? And you gave such clear examples for people to to get a good sense of of why the SRP is really useful and applying the research from and what's included in the warning lexicon can fit together to create a more comprehensive approach. So thank you for sharing that. That was super helpful.

SPEAKER_02 39:29

Yeah, and you're never gonna find an entire population that's gonna be like, I agree with all of those words, and I agree that's what we should use. And I'm sure even Especially in R, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Don't even get me started talking about academics. I tell you. Um but but what whatever you choose, educating the populations that you deal with on that is critical. And I'm one you could pick three words that may not make sense. If you're if if everybody has been educated on it, they understand it and they know what to do, you're in a much better position than you know, having the best words out there, whatever they are, and people not knowing what to do. Like what does it mean? So I I really think that's a great thing that you talked about. And it wasn't just the decision to make these changes, but it's how to really integrate it into your populations, um, which I think we all could use. And again, that's why if you're like, well, I don't want to do this, I want to do something else. Okay. But then integrate it in the same way, put that that same investment that you of you has done, that's that's what you should do. Um, which kind of leads to Can I make a comment on that before we get to the next?

SPEAKER_00 40:44

Comment all you want. So here's my observation good emergency managers recognize that there's always compromise. And particularly in higher ed, because they're just the demographic is so wide, the the uh political and outside influencers are so great. You have to be able to take what you're given and do the best with it. And and so, like I said, this movement for standard response protocol and avoid, deny, defend, it it seemed like it ran counter to the programs that we had already. But after doing the hard work, you know, recognizing, well, the I've got to do this. How am I gonna make this work properly? And that is the skill of a good emergency manager. Sometimes you're just given, for good or bad, and I think in this case for good, you're given the program and and the words that you need to use. How do I make that work the most effectively for my population? And that's what I've been invested in while Stormy, my associate director, has been basically being the chief operating officer of our, you know, standard planning and response and training. I've worked on these strategic things because I think they're the right direction, but it does take work to not assimilate, integrate, I think you said. It takes work to integrate that into your institution and then train on it, right?

SPEAKER_02 42:09

Yeah, because there's the initial, hey, we're telling you, but that's not true integration. Integration takes time because you want it to impact the culture, shape the culture eventually so it can continue. Um, I I mean it's uh just hitting again, and I I tease about academics. No, I I truly appreciate the research that has been done. And and as you've heard in other shows, it's it's vitally important. And I will go back and say for a lot of us in emergency services, emergency operations, um, you will find somebody next to the water cooler and they're gonna be complaining and complaining. And they're gonna complain about two things. One is they're gonna complain about the way things are, and the next sentence out of their mind is gonna be complaining that somebody's making a change, right? It's welcome. That this is these are some of our struggles. So whenever there are positive changes, um, I think they're great. And I'm hoping you can tell us about a positive change. Um, if there are any successes that stand out, and and it could be training, you know, an exercise or an actual incident or even a communication strategy that you felt has validated this approach and and what made it work.

SPEAKER_00 43:25

Yeah, I'm gonna do two. Uh, one of them was the strategic work that we've done uh for the last couple of years that really got advanced uh with Charlie Kirk homicide. It advanced meaning it got fast tracked, basically. We were already working on it, but we needed to demonstrate results more quickly. And that has resulted in a product we call the public safety framework. And so it's it's a plan, it's a strategic plan, but it's got some real teeth to it with program updates and changes and active sharing. Is one of them. We call it active threat now because it might not just be a shooter. So our active threat training, we recognize that we'd been doing it for years, but it was always localized to a small group of people in a department or a unit that had requested it. Since the events of last fall, now we've we've been able to argue successfully that really needs to go to everybody. And so there was a lot of quick work done to update that training. And now we've got a video online that you can log into through our learning management system and take an eight and a half minute video. You can also sign up for a longer video for your whole department or unit, and then you can conduct walkthroughs and security assessments, and there's a whole program built around that. So that is a huge win in just the last six months, which is great. For the second example, I'm going to go back to the COVID years. Um, we started pre-COVID when I mentioned that uh EM came from environmental health and safety to public safety with the new director that I was working under. We were just a two-person shop. Uh, he wanted to get what he called sets and reps, right? And I was like, I don't lift. What is this? And it's just practice, basically. And one of the ways that he wanted to practice was by uh getting into athletics and writing incident action plans for football as if it were just a practice for us. And it turned out that um it wasn't really just a practice, it's one of our higher risks based on the size of the population coming. So just uh kind of pivoting a little bit to say, you know, we could sit back and sit in our EOC and write plans, or we could be out in the field and engaging with our population and saying, how can we support this thing that you do all the time? That was a big success. What that did for us is it honed our ability to communicate with our incident management team. These are about 15, maybe 16 now, different departments on campus, different subject matter experts who, if we had the really big thing, needed to all come together. A lot of times we activate with just a few of them, police and maybe academic affairs or student affairs and housing and facilities management. But if we had the bigger event, it would take everybody. It would take the village to uh determine what to do next. So, how do you drill those people who don't have a safety title in their job every day? And his idea back then was monthly 15-minute calls, just a briefing, just an update. And sometimes it was on our activities, and sometimes it was on the activities of one of the partners on the call. What did that do? Well, that got everybody sort of like, oh, this is how these IMT calls work. I come in, there's a roll call, there's a briefing, and it turns over to the agency who's got the thing, whatever it is. And then when closures happen, when critical events happen, when the pandemic happened, suddenly people who weren't trained officially in incident command system or the national incident management system, who didn't even really know that they had a title or a job function in the IMT that had a different name than their regular day job, they were able to come in and participate as subject matter experts. That paid out in spades when we went through the pandemic. People recognized their lane of travel in the org chart. They recognize that they're probably wearing multiple hats and reaching back to their orgs for other subject matter experts to come in. I think at one point our org chart probably had like four to five hundred people in it. But we weren't managing four to five hundred people individually. It was all delegated, it was all those proper NIMS and ICS ways to do it. So uh I guess the lesson I'm saying is engage with your closest partners, find a way to speak to them that doesn't burden them. 15 minutes a month was actually a good cadence to keep up with these people. Keep it short, keep it sweet, keep the uh information relevant and important. And then when we really need them, okay, now we can spin up and do the big thing. Post-COVID, I learned a good lesson. Uh we were, we were just burned out. And uh there was a year that we kind of fell off the radar with the IMT calls because we were all just kind of burned out. Then we had a couple of incidents like, oh, we're not communicating very well. We're not all on the same page. There are four or five phone calls going on instead of one. And so we got back on the wagon to say, no, we need to do these simple, effective drills slash briefings so that people know how to communicate and take a mission and turn it into an operation.

SPEAKER_02 49:09

I think those are great examples, um, both of them. See, that's you went above and beyond. We asked for one and you gave us two that are really good. Um and this is gonna lead into just another thing. What what's the student population on a normal day? Um, let's say fall semester. What what is your basic population?

SPEAKER_00 49:33

Um it it goes up and down. I mean, it's it's been going up and up, but I think we're about 30,000 students.

SPEAKER_02 49:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 49:42

And about 30,000 employees. And that covers um both the academic campus and the healthcare campus as well.

SPEAKER_02 49:49

Well, and that's one thing that's important is the U of U has an absolutely world-class hospital, um, university hospital attached to it, um, research center. Um, full disclosure, I have had family members either attend or for for treatment or for um for work, for research, for all those things. It it really, it really is um a good place. Thank you. Now, yeah, it is compare that to on let's say a large-scale event, biggest football, biggest anything like that. What's your population? What does it surge to?

SPEAKER_00 50:28

Well, that's an excellent question. Most of our football games, so our stadium is our biggest venue, and it can see uh north of I think 56, 7, 8. It can get bigger than that when a concert comes because you can put chairs on the on the field or the floor, but you're also blocking some seats because of the stage. So if we said 60, I think I'd be safe if we said 60. Yeah. I just and I bring that up. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:00

60,000 people.

SPEAKER_00 51:01

Yeah, and I'm on the biggest day. Sure. I'll I'll I'll add a caveat there. Most of those are on a Saturday, right? For for football. If we've got a football game, like usually beginning of the season, sometimes there's a Thursday game, sometimes there's a concert on a Thursday night, Friday night. Typically we don't have the overlap of 60,000 students and staff and 60,000 patrons, right? But on some of those days, there's a little bit of crossover. If the event starts a bit earlier, uh, let's say a game starts on a Thursday at uh six o'clock kick, well, that's impacting everybody kind of getting out of here earlier on that day. Those are a little bit more rare, but they can happen.

SPEAKER_02 51:49

Well, and I I bring that up because I I want to ask you about some special events. And I think it helps put it into perspective because for anybody out there who's thinking, well, it's a university, you know, what's the what is it population really? Well, the population I would say is greater than most of the cities that exist in the United States. And that's on a daily basis for you. And and it just it highlights when we say large-scale events, these are large events that that happen. And so, question for you, knowing that you now are an emergency management uh director for truly what I would consider a good sized city or a big city in the United States, how do you prepare for, because again, outside populations, and this is normal for cities dealing with this. How do you prepare from an alerting and communication standpoint for these types of events? And how is your approach evolved through your experience in your position?

SPEAKER_00 52:56

I did touch on that a little bit earlier with the football examples, right? It would be great if on a patron season's ticket that there was a way for them to opt into our system, right? Uh and the the challenge is that, you know, if if your grandpa bought tickets, but you get to go one week instead of your cousin, it's not always the same patron arriving with that ticket, right? So it's it's a problem of every game or every event. You have to imagine if your your population coming is completely new. Now, that's not actually true because we have a lot of seasoned ticket holders, but the approach is similar. You've you maybe you've never received an alert from the University of Utah. Maybe you don't know how to sign up. Uh, we've tried a lot of things. Uh, we've tried A-frames in the parking lots with QR codes that people could click on pre-game. But very much like our student population, people are not coming to the University of Utah to sign up for our campus alert, right? That's not, they're coming for school, for class, they're coming for a football game. And it's not until the crisis happens, like a lightning strike that causes a lane rain delay, that they're thinking about, oh, uh, how do I know what happens next? So we've always got to be ready with meeting them exactly where they are. Oh, you you did you didn't sign up early. Let me put the QR code up on the big board and let me put the PA announcement up that says, if you want updates about the rain delay, click this code and you'll get it. We've had more success doing that than trying to do it in the blue sky day. Nothing's happening, but just sign up just in case.

SPEAKER_02 54:46

I'll go to a really quick transition then because uh this is a herding cats example, because the U of U hosts countless summer camps, whether academic, religious, or anything else. And this includes kids from junior high age to high school and some older staying on your campus. And again, that's the herding cats part. For campuses and universities who host similar events like this, does that prevent or present any unique challenges or opportunities for you?

SPEAKER_00 55:21

It does. And I'm gonna rely on the thing that I answered in another question. I can't be the front man, if you will, to every individual who needs an alert, right? Uh, I can't go out and beg and ask parents of minors coming onto campus for one of our summer camps or one of our events to give me their number. But what I can do is equip the uh the sponsor, if you will, the university staff member who does interface with all of the groups to say, here's how you can participate, or if we send an alert, if if we get an alert, we're going to notify your camp counselors as well. They've got they've got communication systems to do this. A good example would be all of the school buses that bring elementary school kids up to the Natural History Museum of Utah. They do this all year round. And uh we don't we don't have all those kids listed in our campus alert system and all their parents. So how does that work? The staff will get the alert and they have systems whereby they can communicate to the schools, to the bus drivers, to the parents to make sure that the alert is getting to that level. Maybe buses have to come earlier to pick up, et cetera, if there's an evacuation. It's the invested partnership of my subject matter experts at each of those venues, whether at summer camps or the stadium or the his uh the museums, they're going to help me get the water to the end of the row.

SPEAKER_02 56:58

That right there, at that nugget, and I know you've hit it a couple times, is something I want every listener to hear again and again. Because you cannot do it all. But the the partnerships and strategy that you have right there will get that end result. So thank you for sharing it.

SPEAKER_01 57:17

Well, Stuart, what's your final takeaway? What do you want people to remember from this conversation about alerting and communication?

SPEAKER_00 57:26

I think, well, I've I've thought about this, and there there are many things. I've said a bunch of them already. Um, one of the things that sinks deeply for the populations that we bring on tours of our public safety building, or that have a chance to sit with us for an hour and us give them a lecture on emergency preparedness. One of the things that hits most for them is for them to see and understand that there's a whole system behind the curtain that they never even thought of that is working on these systems, whether it's plans, whether it's emergency operations centers, weather delay, uh, campus alerting, all of those things are in process behind the scenes. And all that all that I want people to do is be just a little bit curious. How does this work at my institution? Because I bet you it's there. But if they ask, then then the job of the emergency manager or the public information team is so much easier because somebody just poke their head up and said, I know I'm here for my academic career. I know I'm here because it's my job. I know I'm here because I'm a patient going to the hospital. But would you just tell me for a second, what's your safety protocol for this or that or the other? And there are a cadre of professionals that will stand up and answer that question for you. And that gives me great joy to see that people are interested. It also helps people realize oh, there is a system. People are thinking about these challenges, and I'm just not in the dark. And what that prepares them for is when they do get an alert, they go, Oh, I I can trust this. I heard about this guy, I listened to her presentation on SRP, and I know what this is, I know what this means, and now I can do something about it. Anything that we can do to front load that awareness before the crisis happens is going to help us in the crisis. So the I guess it's not just a final takeaway, it's a final plea. Uh, be interested in your institutions, in your cities, and whatever jurisdiction you're in. Be interested in their communication pathways. Sign up for those alerts if you can get them, and and be ready to take action when they come.

SPEAKER_01 59:50

I think that's a great, a great concluding thought. Although I think Eddie has one last question.

SPEAKER_02 59:55

Okay, sure. I'll take I'll take more. I'm just saying there's there's something happening on November 7th, 2026. Okay. If anybody wants to look it up, it it and it could be this year at your stadium, and it it might be that BYU versus Utah Youth's game coming up. My my question is just really simple. I I would say, you know, how bad would you know? But what what do you think the outcome will be on that game?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:27

He just put on his university hat.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:32

Well, I I I can't predict. Um could the the the history between Utah and BYU is long and storied. The pendulum has swung so many times, right? BYU had years of domination. Utah had years of domination. My goodness. And yeah, and both programs have undergone a lot of changes, right? Kyle Whittingham just went to Michigan. Morgan Scally's taken over, we're rebuilding. So it's almost like a roll of the dice. What are you gonna get this year, right? Here's what you're gonna get. You're gonna get a dedicated safety team behind the game, making sure the patrons are having a There you go.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:16

That's the prediction right there that you will be working the game and you will be there in case a lightning strike or anything else to put it on the scoreboard to say, if you need messages, click here. That's the prediction. Um, and I honestly, they're in good hands. They are in good hands.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:34

Thank you for the thank you for the in-state rivalry tease. I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:39

You know, it's it's important. It is.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:43

Oh, that's great. Well, this has been a great conversation. I've loved hearing the examples and the stories and really clear information about how the University of Utah is doing this. And we want our listeners to know that as we're wrapping up today's conversation about campus safety, you do not have to build your immunic your emergency communication strategy alone. You can reach out to your colleagues within the UCC. You can reach out to the Warn Room and to the Alerting Authority. We specialize in helping institutions like yours bridge the gap between academic research and real world response. We develop comprehensive campus-specific message libraries and help you to evaluate your own alert protocols. And our services are designed to ensure that your community knows exactly what to do when it matters most. So if you're ready to take your alerts and warnings to the next level, look us up, send us a message, look at the warning bootcamp coming July 20th through 24th by visiting thewarnroom.com and reach out to us if you need assistance with your policies, plans, and templates. We are here to help.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:54

And I just have to say, if I was affiliated with uh U of U right now and I heard this, I would feel that much more secure. Like truly, I I appreciate what you've said and the example that you guys are doing holistically as as a whole complete team. And that right there, I think, is something that's very special about the university system and higher education as the potential to be there. So thank you for that. And just we are the alerting authority. This is this is why we're here to share stories like this. And we're grateful you could be here, and we look forward to sharing yours.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:32

Thanks, Eddie. Thanks, Jeanette. It's been a pleasure being with you. Keep up the good work.