Best Practices when Crisis Strikes

When an emergency occurs, use your existing policies and procedures, while also adjusting to meet the most pressing needs of your community as the crisis evolves.

Tip: Private schools have overcome unprecedented challenges during crises these last few years. Visit our K–12 user community to learn how your peers have leveraged Blackbaud’s solutions for online learning and emergency preparedness.

• Review emergency contacts and settings

• Use school forms to update profiles

• Update medical data and determine how to handle health and wellness needs

• Cancel or reschedule athletic events

• Consider using assignments for distance learning or updating assignments to fit current needs

  • If you use new types of content, you many need to update some content category settings

  • Review how your staff will communicate academic information, including whether you need to adjust monitoring teams

  • Determine whether your policies or methods for tracking attendance need updated (including new attendance categories).

    Review attendance, course roster reports, and attendance lists to see which students are affected

• Use Student lists, user lists, and other lists to review a filtered subset of information or export data. You can also use pre-built reports and report access.

• Review your communication strategy

  • Post an emergency bulletin

  • Use sign in messages to share information or to prompt users to update their profiles for contact information

  • Use community groups to enable networking and communication

  • Encourage individuals to use school directories to contact faculty and other members of the community

  • Regularly send PushPage newsletters by email to share your school's emergency plans, current status, needs, and recovery efforts

  • Review best practice for emails and how to handle bounced messages

  • Review notification settings to reduce contact fatigue

    Tip: Check out Tabor Academy’s Stacy Jagadowski’s blog post, Crisis Communication Planning for Heads of Schools.

• Review your content strategy, including what types of content you'll publish, who can manage it, how you'll categorize it, how you'll feature it and when to archive it. For example, you might :

  • post content internally on resource boards, community groups, and in academics

  • post content externally on social media, PushPage newsletters, and your school website

  • embed news, announcements, and FAQs to keep your community informed,

  • link to internal and external resources, such as a school news page or import government agencies

  • use video to record reassuring messages from administrators or record instructional content

  • or share photos of your needs, recovery efforts, and more

  • update calendars and review whether events need to be canceled, rescheduled, or added

  • encourage people to subscribe to iCal feeds so they stay up to date with the latest information

  • use lists to indicate supplies your school needs or has available

  • enable individuals to download handbooks,emergency policies, and other resources

  • use school forms for permission and acknowledgements, to update user records, and more

  • use custom forms if individuals who are not logged in should be able to submit a reply, such as for a contact form

  • upload any miscellaneous files you may want to link to as resources

• Update your school website and consider creating a page to use a hub for public facing emergency hub. You'll probably use:

  • Page menus

  • Page widgets

  • Styles

  • Wrap text around photos

  • Fonts & images

  • Detail pages

• Extend your tools with Rest APIs and integrations, such as

  • Blackbaud's SKY API for Schools

  • Google Drive for Students, Apps Education, and Analytics

  • OneRoster

  • Learning Tools Interoperability (including tools for assignments, topics, and anti-plagiarism via Turnitin)

  • Automated texts/phone calls

  • & more

• Determine how to handle deceased users