At 7:31 on an ordinary school morning, a communications office may be arguing over a caption, resizing a poster, or checking somebody’s middle initial. At 7:52, someone runs in and says there are gunshots on campus.
Phones ring. Parents call. Reporters start asking questions. A shaky video reaches Messenger before the administration has gathered the facts. Someone claims there are casualties. Another names a supposed suspect. Screenshots multiply. Within minutes, Facebook has several versions of an incident that the people actually handling it are still trying to understand.
Suddenly, communication is no longer about publicity. It is about safety, truth, dignity, and what one careless sentence can do to frightened people.
That thought stayed with me during the Capacity Building on Strategic Communication: Media Relations and Social Media Management organized by the Regional Development Council VI at the DEPDev Regional Office VI in Iloilo City. I was there representing ISUFST with our PAMMCO Secretary and Information Officer, Ma’am Edz Brito. PIA executives Cheryl Amor discussed development communication, Liez’l Marie Ejeda tackled media and information literacy, and Easter Anne Doza handled media relations and public relations.
Then came news of the shooting at Ateneo de Zamboanga University. Suddenly, the late morning discussion was no longer theoretical.
The tragedy was painful enough on its own. It also reminded those of us in education that campuses are not magically insulated from crises outside their gates. A shooting is an extreme case, but a bomb threat, fire, earthquake, hazing allegation, suicide concern, harassment complaint, food poisoning incident, data breach, missing student, viral video, or serious accident can turn an ordinary Tuesday into the longest day of somebody’s professional life. Research on crisis management in higher education has documented everything from student protests and off-campus tragedies to health crises and damaging allegations. No two crises arrive wearing the same uniform.
I learned some of this before Facebook made everyone a potential broadcaster. In the mid- and late 1990s, I had opportunities to work in public relations involving institutions, personalities, and causes. Years later, as head of a Jesuit school, I found myself dealing with a bomb-related crisis. No seminar quite prepares you for the moment when the case study becomes your school. You are thinking about students, teachers, parents, security, police, information moving around campus, and the next decision you cannot afford to get wrong.
Crisis compresses time. Years ago, an institution might have had the luxury of preparing a statement before the evening news. Today, somebody can livestream an incident while administrators are still walking toward the meeting room.
For those of us in public affairs, information, marketing, and media communication, this is where the job becomes less glamorous and much more consequential. On ordinary days, we post graduations, awards, partnerships, research, and ribbon cuttings. During a crisis, the cheerful scheduled post may need to disappear. The camera may need to stay in the bag. The communicator becomes a verifier, listener, coordinator, record keeper, and sometimes the person expected to find one calm sentence while everybody else is talking at once.
The first obligation is not to make the institution look good. It is to help people stay safe and understand what is actually happening.
In an active-shooter situation, for example, an information officer should not compete with journalists to identify a suspect, announce casualties based on hallway talk, or repost dramatic footage because everyone else already has it. Safety comes first, coordinated with school authorities, law enforcement, and emergency responders. Public information should tell people what they need to do, where they should or should not go, and which channels they can trust.
When facts remain uncertain, saying so is perfectly responsible. “We are still verifying the information and will provide confirmed updates through official channels” may not sound exciting. Good. A crisis statement is not supposed to win a copywriting contest. There is no prize for being first if being first causes harm.
The AdZU response offered an important reminder. The university confirmed what it could, coordinated with authorities, attended to student safety, established official communication channels, discouraged the circulation of unverified information, photos, and videos, and asked that the privacy of those affected be respected. Around tragedies, even well-meaning sharing can cause another kind of injury. Names can reach Facebook before relatives have been properly informed. A photograph taken for “documentation” can turn somebody’s worst day into content.
Sometimes compassion means knowing when not to post.
Then there is the media. Most journalists I have dealt with want the basics: facts, access, context, and somebody willing to answer reasonable questions. Institutions should not automatically regard them as adversaries. Public institutions, especially, answer to the public, and an uncomfortable question from a reporter may simply be the question citizens themselves want answered.
Of course, not every encounter is pleasant. A reporter may be persistent, sensational, combative, or unfair. The same loaded question may come in different ways: “So you admit the school failed?” “Why are you hiding the names?” “Who should be blamed?”
This is where the communicator earns his coffee.
Do not fight the reporter. Do not match aggression with aggression. And do not invent an answer just to make the microphone go away. If a question contains an assumption that has not been established, correct it politely: “That has not been confirmed. What we can confirm at this time is…” Then return to the facts.
Neither should an information officer be bullied into disclosing what should remain private. Protect minors. Respect families. Do not speculate about blame while an investigation is underway. Be careful with “off the record.” Have one authorized and properly prepared spokesperson rather than five offices giving six versions of the story.
A hostile question is not necessarily a hostile journalist. Even a hostile journalist does not give us permission to become a hostile institution.
There is another phrase in public relations that has always bothered me: “control the narrative.” In a genuine crisis, people are not characters in our narrative. They are students waiting for parents, mothers refreshing Facebook, employees wondering whether to evacuate, journalists trying to verify information, responders doing their jobs, and families whose lives may have changed within minutes.
Besides, nobody really controls the narrative anymore. There are CCTV recordings, screenshots, livestreams, witnesses, bloggers, anonymous accounts, group chats, journalists, critics, and that one relative who forwards everything with “FYI” without checking the date.
What an institution can still control is its own credibility.
That takes judgment. Not everything true needs to be released immediately. Not everything legally publishable is humane to publish. Not every criticism deserves a defensive reply, and certainly not every troll deserves one. Sometimes the critic is right. If a journalist uncovers a genuine failure, a parent raises a valid concern, or students point to something we overlooked, good communication cannot spin the problem away.
When we are wrong, correction is stronger than spin. When facts are incomplete, humility is better than bluff. And when people are hurting, humanity should outrank virality.
So, yes, prepare the contact lists and holding statements. Train spokespersons. Know the audiences and the channels they actually use. Build relationships with journalists before you need them. Run simulations. Monitor misinformation. Keep employees informed so they do not discover their own institution’s crisis through Facebook. Afterward, sit down and ask what worked and what failed.
But beneath every protocol is something no manual can completely supply: discernment. In difficult moments, we have to know when to speak, what to share, whom our words may hurt, and when silence may temporarily serve truth and compassion better than another post.
Crisis communication, after all, is not mainly about saving face. It is about preserving trust when people have every reason to be frightened, angry, suspicious, or confused. And trust is painfully slow technology. We build it long before an emergency—one truthful story, one returned call, one correction, one difficult question we did not dodge, and one vulnerable person whose dignity we refused to sacrifice for clicks.
Then the phone rings.
And we discover whether all those ordinary days taught us how to handle the extraordinary one.
Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.
