I have decided that I am going to try and focus more on Valley State University and less on the city of Valley City. To me it seems that doing this paper on VCSU will be much easier as there are not as many people that were giving out information to the faculty, staff, and students. I feel that the faculty and staff ant VCSU were very good at getting out the information that everybody needed to know during the flood fighting effort and what was going to happen afterwards. Also I feel that the teachers were very accommodating to the students with how assignments were going to be done and how they would be turned in. Also the teachers were very accommodating with the students that I have talked to that do not have easy access to the internet to complete the assignments that were given out.
I feel that Dr. Shirley did an excellent job of making sure that everyone knew what was going on and making time available to the students so that they could go and help sandbag and with other parts of the flood fighting effort. The faculty and staff were very reasonable about canceling class during this crisis and that made it a lot easier to help with the effort that was put forth to fight this flood. By allowing the students to help out it also had a very positive reflection on VCSU and the students that go to school there. I heard lots of people talking about how much they appreciated the effort that was put forth from the VCSU students during this flood. I am sure that many of the people that were involved in this flood will remember the effort that was made by everyone to fight this flood and keeping it from doing much damage to Valley City.
One thing that will help with writing this paper is that I still have all of the emails that were sent out to the students about what would be happening with classes and the flood fighting. These emails were a very good source of communication between the staff and the students. Also the text messages that were sent out to the students that were on that program would have been helpful in knowing what was going on during this flood. To me it seems that everyone at VCSU did an excellent job of notifying people of what was going on.

For this blog we are supposed to write about our communication crisis research paper. I am going to do my research paper either on Valley City or on Valley City State University. This is the only time that I have ever had to deal with any major flooding and it has taught me some valuable lessons about what should be done in order to make things go smoothly with the public. In times of crisis it is very important to get your messages out quickly and that they can be easily understood by the public that needs to hear and understand them. The closest I have come to any kind of flooding before was when Lake Metigoshe got really high and flooded some basements, but that did not require the crisis communications that have been required this year across the whole state. The people of Valley City seemed to have the communications process down fairly well and got messages out to people fairly quickly and they were pretty clear as to what they wanted from the people in the area to do. One thing that I thought was really effective is that the city and the Valley City State University campus worked together and this seemed to help get the word out through emails to the students so that they knew where they were needed and could help when they had the time. Another thing that was used well was the emergency whistle in town. By using the whistle it let the citizens of Valley City know that there help was needed again and they should meet at the winter show building and help sandbag. Also the morning meetings with the officials from the different groups that were involved what was going on and the citizens was a very good idea because people could bring up their concerns about what was happening and what was yet to come. I felt the Dr. Steven Shirley did an excellent job of making sure that the staff and students were notified of what was going on and what was happening around the community and campus. Also I think that the campus was very accommodating to the students so that they could assist in the sandbagging effort and communicating with the students about what was going to happen with classes for the days during the sandbagging effort. Also they have been very helpful in assisting the students since campus has been closed.