SENDING LOUDER SMOKE SIGNALS:
COM TECH for Emergencies & Every Day Use
A brief presentation by DaraMonifah Cooper
Official Abstract from UVI Research Day 2018
Saturday, May 11, 2018 at 9:00am – 12:00 pm
at the Disaster Preparedness Workshop
University of the Virgin Islands,
St. Thomas Campus Administrative and Conference Center
DaraMonifah Cooper, ’09 UVI ALUM/Communications (B.A.) & ’16 Full Sail University New Media Specialist (M.A.)
- UVI Cooperative Extension Service Communications/Technology Agent
- Business Owner New Media Specialist/Digital Media Consultant
- WUVI Radio Station Manager
- UVI Communications Instructor
First, I want to thank the St. Thomas Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. for considering my request to speak briefly on the subject of our communication infrastructure. They don’t know me, but were wiling to allow me to speak because they understand the urgency in the subject matter. Obviously, they do or they wouldn’t have put this together, so I wanted to just take a quick moment to say thank you for the foresight in putting this together. It’s a lot of work, and many layers of tasks to get something like this done. I’ve been an event planner and organizer for years, so I know…that being said, there should be more people in this room.
They put it in the news paper, on the radio, printed and put up fliers, shared it on Facebook, texted, used word-of-mouth and whatever else they could think of I’m sure. But let me ask this, and it’s the same question I ask every organization, agency and individual who I’ve helped: Who’s job is it to figure out the best way to reach people? Does anyone know? Who is their target audience? What are the most effective methods of getting information out to your specific audience(s)? How have they heard about your event(s)?
It was very timely that VITEMA has been sending out the invitations for everyone to join ALERT VI. I’m basically interested in offering some additional support in the Virgin Islands specifically related to how we get messages out to people.
Basically, from our experience at WUVI RADIO staying on air with our livestream, phones, internet power and everything remaining working, during and after the hurricanes, we saw first hand how important it is for all media agencies to have a cooperative mechanism for sharing information. While WSTA was the best station to listen to, their phones and internet were down and ours stayed up so we were taking calls for them and passing messages.
At one point CNN and other national media who could hear and see us online. People kept contacting us to connect them with other stations, media sources and of course family members. Now, although they did an excellent job turning our radio station classroom into a full-fledged media communication control center literally overnight, something THAT important, should be a collaboration between agencies so that no one agency or individual gets overwhelmed. We were taking 6 hour shifts around the clock.
At times we regularly collaborated with WSTX to simulcast their updates and when the Governor’s press conferences went live we not only aired them, but recorded them, uploaded them to SoundCloud and shared them on Facebook for anyone who might’ve missed the important announcements.
We teach the students to crunch their messages to be shared as a 3-5 minute summary before they go into details. Based on my research since after the storms, there are community suggestions that Government officials and other PIOs or spokespersons should do the same to be more effective so that listeners can get the gist without having to endure the long messages that often cause them to stop listening.
Sending text messages is another example of where we teach students that the first 140 characters has to summarize the rest of the message or people may not click the link, especially if it is an automated text from VI-Alert or VITEMA etc.
According to one of my associates at WSTX, there are some places in the Caribbean that are teaching specific persons to use ham radios. Our tsunami alarms still aren’t fixed… and even if they are, they’re only effective for non-local warnings.
You get the point. I’m speaking on behalf of those of us in the field who are young, some call them “millennials”, and not necessarily popular or deemed important enough for our knowledge and experiences to be take seriously. We want to offer assistance/support in whatever way is accepted, but we have to get them in the room to have buy in. If there’s an opportunity during any public event, I can share basically a version of what we see in a way that hopefully will encourage them to listen.
