Crisis Communication – the 2010 Nashville Flood website
The flood website has been a continually changing resource for the Vanderbilt community. In it’s earliest form, it was a very plain single HTML page that we built on Sunday, May 2. (18,600 unique pageviews that day). There were only a few of us who had dependable internet and phones that day; for those of us who did, were pretty much on our phones and updating the website, tweeting and facebooking constantly for the next several days.
By Tuesday, May 4, we realized that the site was just going to keep growing and the amount of information we were trying to get out to the VU community was multiplying exponentially. The flood site had almost 71,000 unique pageviews by Wednesday midday.
That night, we moved the site from 2 static html pages into WordPress; this was really great for many reasons, one of which is that it allowed me to turn over some of the updates and announcements sections to some of our oh-so-helpful news service colleagues, as they didn’t need to know any html, coding, or how to FTP. They could simply type, upload docs, create new pages, and go with it.
Everything in that first week was fast; plans were made, and put into motion immediately thereafter. When the details for the Disaster Pay Benefit were being put together on May 6 (which allowed employees forced from their homes from the flood to have 2 weeks of paid leave) — we put together the online application form and supplementary informational pages within 1 to 2 hours and it was sent out to all VU employees on May 7. One day after we were asked if we could create a “Craigslist type site” for people to post items they’d like to donate – and for flood victims to find replacement items for their homes – the Flood Assistance Network was online and people were (and continue to) post items.
During all of this, our office was in the final stages of two major projects – finishing the Vanderbilt website redesign (launch had been scheduled months ago for May 18) and the migration of over 4,000 pages of content from the Vanderbilt News website. We kept chugging on with those projects in between flood-related work (going slightly crazy in the process)… and we launched the new website on May 18, as planned. Shortly thereafter, we applied the new (and very handy at times like this!) Vanderbilt WordPress Theme – and the flood site was quickly and easily migrated into the new Vanderbilt branded look. Unique pageviews as of May 18 were up to approximately 135,000.
View the progression of information shared via the flood site.
The list of people to thank for their assistance in this ongoing project is almost impossible to think of … as SO MANY pitched in. So I’ll just say – thanks everybody. You know who you are, and you’re appreciated … it’s a pleasure to work alongside colleagues like you!