How to turn crisis response into community trust
Buckle up and bookmark this page for future reference—you never know when you might need it.
Why it's important.
Universities face events that can escalate quickly and without warning—from extreme weather and public health emergencies to campus safety incidents.
Clear, timely communication during these moments is essential to protect the university community and maintain trust.
The idea.
You can't control the crisis, but you can control the communication. And in a crisis, your message is your leadership.
The institutions that thrive are the ones that prepare, unify and speak with purpose—before, during, and after the storm.
Here's how.
University of Miami's plan works because it makes communications a core function of crisis response, not just an afterthought. Success takes:
Unified messaging from a center-led comms model.
Real-time coordination between emergency management and leadership.
Social listening tools to surface sentiment and squash misinformation.
Multichannel outreach, from internal dashboards to emergency texts to FAQ pages.
A people-first mindset that values humility, empathy, and clarity in every message.
An example.
As Hurricane Ian approached Florida in 2022, leaders at the University of Miami didn't scramble; they activated a decisive plan.
The result: Unified action, a faster response, and strengthened trust across the campus—and the community.
Teams across departments used coordinated and pre-approved messaging to ensure clarity.
Schools and colleges paused all non-crisis content and turned readers toward official updates.
AI -supported listening tools flagged emerging misinformation and reader sentiment in real time.
The result: Unified action, a faster response, and strengthened trust across the campus—and the community.
What this means.
Your response to a crisis should be more than a canned statement—it should be the result of collaboration, empathy, and thoughtful decision-making.
Looking ahead.
A disaster-prone world brings more frequent and more complex crises to higher education.
University of Miami's crisis comms case study, built on its 100 years of history, sets a benchmark for industry leaders.
The takeaway.
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To achieve this, we are committed to continuously investing in advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence. Generative AI, for example, has the potential to increase the scale and speed of our marketing content personalization like no other recent technology development. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large enterprises will be synthetically generated. We have rich insights into our customers' real-time behavior and intent, and AI helps us translate that into dynamic content at scale, augmenting sales with AI as part of our Verizon Velocity Selling strategy. On your point about the lens of emotion, we are leveraging advanced AI and generative AI to gain a deeper, more empathetic understanding of our customers' journeys. Through the use of "conversational intelligence," we actively analyze interactions across all our communication channels—including phone calls, chat, and email—to score customer sentiment and track our commitments in real-time. This AI-driven insight allows us to provide more sensitive and personalized service. For example, our technology can identify signals of customer frustration, enabling our specialized teams to proactively engage and provide a higher level of care. By focusing on the sentiment around each interaction, we aim to move beyond transactional support to build stronger, more positive brand relationships. Ultimately, our ability to deliver winning customer experiences is inextricably linked to this level of personalization. When we truly understand our customers—both rationally and emotionally—we can anticipate their needs, offer proactive solutions, and provide a seamless, intuitive experience across all touchpoints, ensuring that our customers feel heard, understood, and valued.
