Emergency Notifications: Getting the word out at Notre Dame
by Erik Runyon on December 29, 2011
Back in November, Chas Grundy wrote about our emergency procedure for ND.edu. When we implemented this feature for ND.edu, we based the functionality on a single-source file. This gave the ability to update the message on both ND.edu and emergency.nd.edu quickly and easily. The added bonus to this approach is that we could then use that same file to build a script that could be used on any Notre Dame site to display the emergency message. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The results
nd.edu
As part of the ND.edu redesign, we created two different designs for the emergency bar. The first is the standard “notification” that we want people to notice, but not convey a feeling of true emergency. This corresponds to the “Level One: Local and Internal” from Chas’ article.
When we really want to grab the audiences’ attention, we do two things. First, we increase the height of the emergency bar and change the color to red. Second, the feature story is replaced by the emergency notification. This is “Level Two: Local but Critical”.
m.nd.edu
Our mobile site monitors the same file, and in case of emergency the “Emergency” icon is tagged with a notification symbol. Viewing the section then displays the current message. Simple, but effective. We saw visits to this section jump exponentially during our snow closing back in February 2011.
Emergency Script
To further get the message out, we put together a javascript snippet that can exist on any university site. Each page load checks a central script, and in the case of an emergency, adds a bar to the top of the site and displays the emergency title along with a link to emergency.nd.edu. Below is an example of the Notre Dame News site in both previously mentioned states.
Level One:
Level Two:
The Payoff
The huge advantage to this approach is that we can display emergency information on dozens (soon to be hundreds) of Notre Dame sites by changing a single file. The script to display the message is available to all Notre Dame developers to include in their sites, and is a simple cut-and-paste install.
HighEdWeb 2011 Slides and Notes
by Erik Runyon on November 1, 2011
Last week I attended HighEdWeb which took place in Austin, TX. This was my first trip to this conference, and perhaps feeling a little over-ambitious, I co-presented a talk with programmer extraordinaire Jeremy Friesen titled “Feeding the Beast”, which was about encouraging API use around Notre Dame. I also took part in the poster presentation portion of the conference and presented on how we (Marketing and Communications) use a base theme to build all our sites which gives us a jump-start on accessibility and mobile on each design.
The code for Jeremy’s and my talk and the visuals for my poster presentation are up on my GitHub account Also included are Jeremy’s and my notes for the talks we attended. Slides for the API presentation are on Speaker Deck.