Fasten your seatbelts, communicators. It's going to be another bumpy year (or five or 10). Student activism, campus protests, racist incidents, sexual assault, student misconduct, free speech, academic freedom, and data breaches are just a few of the issues that have made the past few years on college campuses challenging and sometimes exhausting. Add heightened tensions fueled by political polarization, stir in a campus population dominated by students accustomed to sharing their thoughts and experiences on social media, and it becomes clear why issues management is an increasingly critical role at higher education institutions.

Issues such as those listed above can directly and significantly affect a campus's operations and reputation—and how an institution responds can have a greater influence than the issue itself. Situations that once might have been contained to a few people can now quickly gain widespread attention and generate passion outside campus borders, largely due to digital and social media's ability to amplify stories. Institutions must monitor and be prepared to respond to a greater number and wider array of matters than ever before. How to effectively and, when possible, proactively address numerous time-consuming, potentially disruptive, and sometimes unnecessarily damaging issues is a growing concern among university leaders and communicators. Although many situations originate outside our campuses, they often affect members of our community.

My institution, North Carolina State University, is located in Raleigh, the state capital. Beginning in March 2016, North Carolina became the focus of national attention when the state legislature passed House Bill 2, commonly referred to as the "bathroom bill." Among other measures, the law stated that transgender individuals must use the public restroom that corresponds with the gender listed on their birth certificate. The highly publicized reaction to the law led organizations such as the NCAA and NBA to move high-profile athletic events to other states. Other groups canceled conferences, and some musicians called off concerts. HB2 affected our campus's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community as well as their friends, families, and many allies. The law also garnered a strong response from other community members. Our administration responded by sending factual communications across campus reiterating that the new law didn't affect NC State's strong equal opportunity and nondiscrimination policy ensuring that "all students, faculty, and staff are protected from discrimination, regardless of age, color, disability, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or veteran status." We used social media, campus meetings, and other channels to communicate that NC State remains steadfast in its commitment to welcoming and supporting all people.

Then, in September 2016, the police-involved shooting of Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, the state's largest city, gained nationwide attention and garnered days of protests. Following the incident, hundreds of NC State students held a peaceful "blackout" rally that concluded with a "die-in" inside the student union. Students lay silently on the floor to represent the number of lives lost to police-involved shootings across the U.S., while others held protest signs. An online letter from the chancellor and messages on the university's social media channels voiced support for the students' handling of the situation. We restated the university's commitment to diversity and equity, provided information about appropriate campus actions and resources, and continued to engage in discussions. These examples, like others experienced by campuses across the country, demonstrate the need for issues management and highlight the additional time and resources required to address such situations.

Understanding issues management

Managing issues and managing crises require different structures and responses. Crisis management is about managing the consequences of events and issues that can significantly and negatively affect public safety and/or an institution's reputation, finances, or mission. It involves applying strategies to help an organization overcome or effectively deal with a substantial negative event. Crisis management is primarily about minimizing negative impacts and, when possible, taking action to produce some positive outcomes.

Issues management is the process of identifying and addressing issues upfront (and tracking potential issues) so that they don't rise to the level of crisis. At its best, issues management is proactive, but it's often at least somewhat reactive.

On our campus, recent issues we've been monitoring include ongoing concerns about HB2 and reactions to HB142 (the March 2017 legislative compromise that repealed and replaced the contentious bathroom bill), controversial speakers invited by student groups, and what might happen to our "dreamer" students (young people brought illegally to the U.S. as children but eligible to apply for a type of temporary legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program). In each case, issues management practices have quickly identified concerns and helped the university provide factual information to campus audiences.

In higher education, issues management is about more than protecting an institution's reputation or bottom line. It involves correcting inaccurate information, tackling problems with honesty and transparency, and working with the campus community toward productive and beneficial resolutions. Issues can go on for months or even years. In addressing campus climate challenges, for example, effective issues management provides an opportunity to learn about specific concerns and implement strategies that help educate, solve problems, or otherwise move the campus culture in a positive direction.

Higher education, however, tends to be much better at emergency management than issues management. Most campuses have systems for responding to an emergency or disaster. Crisis communications and issues management functions are regularly driven by emergency management structures. As a result, campuses are often unprepared to identify and handle nonemergency situations that can have significant negative effects. Worse, institutions are often ill-equipped to confront circumstances that if known and effectively addressed would never become major problems.

Why it matters

Issues and crises call for different types of management and responses across a few key categories. Readying your institution to effectively handle situations offers advantages you typically don't have when dealing with a crisis, such as:

More time: Identifying issues before they become big problems provides more time to assess circumstances, determine the best course of action, and implement effective strategies. Although you can prepare for a crisis, the urgency of the incident demands a fast response that brings its own challenges.

More options: Effective issues management allows teams to explore the best choices and make well-informed decisions about how to respond. Your alternatives are much more restricted in a crisis due to lack of time and awareness, increased expectations, and the quick spread of information on social and digital media. When your phone starts ringing or reporters arrive on your campus, your choices have already been severely limited.

Opportunity to mitigate damage: In crises, negative impacts are inevitable. But with issues management, you usually have more time to make informed decisions and minimize or eliminate financial or reputational threats. For example, if you identify an issue early, you can correct rumors, inaccuracies, or misinformation on social media before they spread widely; hold town hall meetings to bring sensitive matters into the open and encourage sharing, learning, and positive dialogue; or invite concerned students to meet with university administrators to work toward positive outcomes.

More information and confidence: Issues management provides the opportunity to gather information, plan, and implement strategies that offer more confidence in the outcome. In a crisis, decisions must be made with the information at hand.

Where to start

Identify a team that has the responsibility, authority, and functional ability to monitor and respond to concerns. Having a team is important because effectively managing issues requires a group effort with a variety of expertise. This team, or at least its leadership, should have a direct line to the president or chancellor and other senior university leaders to keep them informed or engaged.

Issues management teams can take different forms, but the solution should fit the organizational structure and culture of the campus. A team may be housed entirely in the university communications unit, it can be a cross-campus group of employees that helps monitor issues and meets regularly to decide how to address them, or it can be a combination. At NC State, university communications is ultimately responsible for issues management, but we collaborate as needed with cross-campus partners to identify, evaluate, proactively address, and respond to important issues.

Regardless of composition, the issues management team should not consist of all the same players as the emergency management team. While some overlap is likely, an issues management team needs to view matters through a different lens and be more proactive.

An issues management team is best led by communications professionals with the skills and experience to manage crisis communications as well as regular public relations activities. But the strongest approach involves collaborating with cross-campus partners who understand and can interact with key audiences in an effective, direct, and trustworthy manner.

As NC State's chief communications officer, I lead the university's issues management function along with our executive director of university relations. Other campus partners we consistently work with include additional staff from university communications, academic and student affairs, public affairs, institutional equity and diversity, university police, environmental health and public safety, as well as the chancellor's, provost's, and general counsel's offices. Along with colleagues in their respective units and divisions, these partners help monitor and report concerns.

In this model, our campus partners can alert us to potential issues, and our central team works directly with partners to review, discuss, and manage issues and potential areas of concern. We also work with other offices and committees, such as the Bias Incident Response Team, Student Conduct, and the Emergency Operations Group. We update and engage the chancellor's cabinet and other university leaders as appropriate.

As we strive to find the best structure to manage the myriad issues universities face today, we've learned to be flexible. We recently repurposed a vacant position to create a role for dedicated issues management support and are consistently working to improve our campuswide team approach. We will make necessary adjustments to improve our effectiveness, and I'm confident that a dedicated focus on continually improving our issues management operation will be critical to helping NC State achieve its strategic goals.

Always be listening

Online and social media play a significant role in the growth and expansion of issues that campuses must address, but they also offer some of the best tools for staying abreast of such matters. (Read "Catch the Conversation" in the March/April 2017 Currents for more on social listening tools.)

Communications teams use social media monitoring tools to identify issues, track specific keywords and mentions across social and online channels, identify trends and influencers, determine the positive and negative sentiment attributed to certain topics, track how conversations spread, discover what audiences are participating in certain discussions, and measure their impact. The data management, analytics, and reporting capabilities available through social listening tools allow users to monitor, quantify, and report on issues in real time.

Social listening tools are essential to any issues management program. (Several free or low-cost tools can provide a decent level of monitoring and reporting capabilities, but I recommend investing in enterprise-level software.) In addition to the ability to monitor social discussions, you need a strategy for using these tools to help reduce the length, scope, and severity of an issue. Following is an outline of an issues management model NC State follows.

Listen: Social never sleeps. Setting up searches for key words and phrases enables your monitoring tool to alert you to potential issues as they arise. 

Evaluate: Capture and assess mentions, metrics, and other pertinent data. Review and determine the relevance and risk level of what you find. Not all negative comments or situations require a response, and not all critics and detractors are worth trying to win over. 

Engage: How your institution addresses an issue can matter as much as the issue itself. Implementing an engagement framework, such as the one outlined below, will help you determine when and how to respond.

• Ignore the trolls. In some cases, replying can make an irrelevant issue or comment gain traction and appear relevant. 
• Acknowledge an incident or issue, and provide factual information about it.
• Respond thoughtfully, and correct any inaccurate information. Empathy and honesty can go a long way toward resolving a situation. 
• Escalate your engagement when necessary. Some issues require a broader range of responses on a variety of channels. Some issues might lead to decisions to send campuswide emails; post information on the university's homepage; communicate with Student Conduct, student affairs, or other university offices; arrange individual or small group meetings with students, faculty, and staff; or organize campus forums or town halls. If an issue gains traction quickly, then a media relations response could be part of the solution. 

Resolve: Resolution takes different forms. You can resolve an issue by providing facts or posting an empathetic statement online or on social media, but it's sometimes better to resolve an issue offline through direct, personal conversations with an individual or group of concerned community members. Later, you can issue a response or state the resolution on the institution's social and digital channels. 

Review: After resolving an issue, assess how effectively it was handled. Was your social media strategy effective? Do you need additional tools or resources in the future? Did unanticipated questions arise?

Demonstrate success: Show university leadership how social listening tools and an engagement framework benefit the institution and help your team manage critical situations. I'm able to do this informally as necessary, but social monitoring tools also provide analysis capabilities for formal reports and to support decisions with data.

Effective issues management takes time and resources, but it's a reality that campuses must address. It's worth the investment. Having a strategic system in place increases a university's ability to monitor and address problems, stave off preventable crises, and remain focused on the institution's goals. Individuals who possess the skill set and experience to manage issues effectively will increasingly be seen as valuable assets to their institutions.