(NB: You might be looking for this post on Air France, apologies for the bad link on Twitter.)
For those of you not in the UK, this will seem a little weird, but yesterday, 6 inches of snow pretty much ground our country to a halt. (Don't ask.. but to be fair, it was our worst snow for nearly 20 years) Anyway, this blog isn't about local authorities and train companies being caught off guard by so-called adverse weather conditions. And it's not about the fact that they couldn't open schools or grit roads, but that they didn't make the best of their digital communications tools to get information out there quickly to the people who cared. And that, is a global problem... not one peculiar to us Brits who can't work out how to get out of their driveways if there's a severe frost!
But... it's not hard; and I know this from real life experience because I've worked with several airlines and other companies that simply have to have a contingency plan to communicate quickly in case things go wrong. So here are some of the lessons learned that can easily be applied by a small primary school as by a local authority or an energy company.
I'll try to distil them in to some simple tips and gotcha's!
Timeliness: "No news is just as good as any kind of news"
Don't have a bloated procedure for sign-off of 'statements' to the public and don't hold back from publishing if you have no information. If I go to a school website to find out if the school is open or closed, and it has nothing to say at all about the weather, then I'm going to call the office. If it says "We will have to take a decision on whether or not the school will open today. Keep an eye out here for more news when we have it." then I'm not going to call the office to be told that there is nothing to know... I'm instead going to wait patiently! If you're going to have to later on in the day accept that you got caught out by some bad weather, it's also ok to say early in the day that you've been caught out and are unable to provide any good information right now. Sometimes the window for this is very small, in my school example, it may only occur to a parent to check at 8am, and they may have to leave the house at 8.30am...
If sign-off and approval are important, then do it now. Don't wait til you need the statement - get a generic statement signed off that could be modified to fit a number of situations, then make it, or a series of statements available to the people who publish information on the site. Leave them in a text file on the web server itself so that someone could find them even if they forgot where to look for them.
Make the site publishing tools accessible from anywhere
I learned this the hard way a long, long time ago. Since then, I've always specified in anything we do that the content management system has to be accessible from anywhere. No VPN, no special software, etc. I need to be able to walk into an Internet cafe and use someone else's PC and it should work. In more sophisticated situations where security has to be tighter, we don't make the whole site accessible in this way, just some specific bits that come in to play when a contingency situation arises.
I can well imagine that yesterday a lot of phone calls went like this: "Sorry, I can't update the website until we can get someone in the office" - "Can you talk me through it?" - "Erm.. not really." Which is probably the reason that The Royal Borough of Kingston's website was updated finally at 4pm today. When they discuss why things are this way, no doubt the IT security guy will get it in the neck!
Have somewhere to put it...
The simpler your website template, the easier it will be to put emergency information up quickly. A blog site for example... no problem, you just create a blog and it appears at the top of the home page. But if your homepage has a big Flash movie in the middle of it, you need to find something simpler, something that is just text based, that can be put above the Flash, or replace it entirely. Either that or try to get a Flash developer into your offices through a foot of snow...
So a contingency plan can be as simple as knowing which module on your home page you can change to be a text only box into which you can hand-code links to other websites, or other pages on the site. This allows you to put up a simple "we're working on it" message, right through to a more comprehensive; "Go to this website for info on X, and this site for info on Y, or call us on... "
Some emergencies can last a long time, and develop their own entire sets of information that will evolve into a series of categories. For example, the Buncefield Oil Depot explosion. This will start in a pure crisis mode - What happened, where it was, what was affected, was anyone killed? This would be coped with in that module we talk about above. But then after a while, you will start adding in things like which roads are closed. Where do people affected get immediate help with accommodation or food? A whole variety of information that is tough to plan, because you don't know you need it until someone hands it to you. So you need a framework that is infinitely flexible. But actually, this is very simple. A top level of category (home page) with some custom text, and a series of sub-pages that can be created at will when a new category of information appears. Don't worry about having a clever 4 section IA. People will find the information so long as it is clearly named, no matter how many categories you end up with.
An emergency mini-site
However, this new requirement for all these pages totally trashes your existing website structure. So, you have to plan for a worst case scenario. A scenario where potentially, everything else on your website is largely irrelevant because 99.9% of the people coming are only looking for one thing. So in a case like this, you might as well kill two birds with one stone, and replace your home page with a new page that only deals with this emergency and a series of sub pages related to it. But do it in a way that is very light on file sizes, images, etc. This will also dramatically help the site cope with the increased demand being placed on the website. Make the design of this very light and text heavy. The 'branding' should be restricted pretty much only to a logo in a header, and use the style sheet from the rest of the site. If you don't do it this way, and you forget to redesign this template when you redesign the website, it won't look too bad if it's not on the current design.
When we covered Steve Fossett's round the world flights (Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer), we had near the end, an unbelievable amount of traffic for our amateur operation and the site went a bit slow. So for two hours, we flipped a switch that turned the website into one page, that simply showed where Steve was, and about 100 words of copy describing his status. We dropped all the other images in the site. This was the same mode we would have used had something terrible happened to Steve, which fortunately it didn't. All that 'flipping the switch' did, was change which home page site visitors were directed to. So the old homepage was still there, but visitors were just being directed to our light one instead. if you want to get really sophisticated, you could do a little bit of javascript in the header of every page on the site that checks to see if the site is in this mode. This way, even if people return to old bookmarks, or find specific pages on a search engine, they'll get redirected to your emergency page.
When we weren't using it, this site was simply one page with an empty navigation menu based on a very simple template, that was invisible to web users and search engines. We could edit the text in the content management system, as well as add new pages that would automatically appear in the menu / navigation on every page that had that template. For clients who have complex emergency plans, we pre-populate some sample pages with content from their contingency plan.
You can also use this mini site to be a bit more useful! In the context of that explosion, or a flood say, you might publish the claims hotline numbers for all the major insurance companies. Put yourself in the shoes of your users. What will they need? What can I do to be the most helpful to them in their time of need. Don't say "Most insurance companies have a claims hotline - call that" - instead, go and find as many numbers for those hotlines as you can and publish them. It's not hard for you to look them up once, as opposed to the hundreds of people affected having to do that over and over. Don't worry if you can't find all of them... better to be some use than no use.
Then at some point, you'll downgrade the emergency, but want to make this point of reference still available. So in a case like this, you'll put your site's home page back to normal, but make a link to your mini site from that home page, with a one line update on the emergency maybe.
To put that in the context of someone who had trouble yesterday: National Rail. They have some fantastic information systems, and feeds, but they were pretty unavailable because of the demand on the website. If they had said that they would sacrifice bookings and other business as usual activity, or at least demoted it to a link to their 'normal site', then their homepage would simply have been a list of the status of the main rail lines in the UK. Seeing as many of them were: "No service" - this would have really helped reduce the amount of traffic to their site as people would have got what they wanted without clicking on a thing.
Finally - The Goony Bird Story
I don't know where this phrase came from, but it was used a lot by the PR pro's I worked with at Virgin and a few other places. It basically refers to a rather silly 'and finally' story that would be running whilst at the same time something very sober was going on.
I think it harks back to a newspaper that was doing something like giving news of the death of a monarch, "britain mourns" kind of thing, and below it, or close to it was some silly feel good story "and now, on a more cheery note!". The two just didn't look right together, and it was entirely inappropriate to be bringing such tragic news whilst at the same time being so frivolous.
In the context of what we are doing here, it basically means that you should re look at content for its appropriateness in the emergency that you're dealing with. For example, if you're being criticised for not being responsive enough or prioritising the wrong things, yet you have a story about your latest investment in a local school for clowns... it's not going to send the right message. Similarly, if your welcome tagline is "Howdy Babe" yet people are coming to the site because their neighbourhood has just gone up in smoke, they're not going to appreciate it. So just re-look at these pieces of content and little touches through the eyes of someone coming there in an emergency - and just know how you're going to deal with them if that does happen.
In summary - this is really simple stuff, and if I were to pick out just three rules to prioritise above all of these it would be:
1 - have an element at the top of your homepage that you can take over with simple text and HTML
2 - make this element manageable from any PC anywhere (with appropriate password security of course), and by people with a variety of skills ("yes I can talk you through it on the phone!")
3 - get something up there soon - even if you have no news. And update it - even if there is still no news and that update is simply to change the 'last updated' time...
And the very last and relatively new tip is "Use Digital Social Spaces"
It's ok to go to the places on the web where people are discussing what's going on and offering that help and information there. Whether it's a Facebook group sprung up around your company, town, brand or school - or Twitter, where you can see clearly people asking questions about the things happening (go search for #uksnow in Twitterscan or Twitscoop to see what I mean). Information spreads much faster here, and the tools are much more accessible. So if I am receiving information on the phone or radio from colleagues, and can't get it on our website, there's no reason I shouldn't start putting it out on Twitter - even if that means going and finding the people who want the information and sending it to them directly. I could have seen someone in the national traffic control centre yesterday spending a bit of time to calmly inform of major road closures on Twitter, or for someone at Transport for London's control room to be putting out news about when buses were due back on the roads, or when tube lines reopened.
So come on, my local council, train company, electricity company and others... it's not hard! Actually - maybe this message is to web designers. Come on guys - think ahead! Every site we at EMC Conchango work on has a contingency plan of some sort; some more complex than others for sure based on the risks that they face. For some it's as simple as knowing which module on the home page they could replace. Others have networks of contingency sites that hopefully never do anything; but it's always, always thought about for all of them.