Crises can damage your reputation, cost you time and money, and distract focus from the key strategic decisions required to grow your institution’s online presence. Wouldn’t it be great if you could see them coming and course-correct before they become a serious problem?

Social media has the answer. More than just a tool for engagement, it’s become a vital early warning system. In a recent session for Social Media Strategies Summit, Rachael Hagerstrom – Director of Issues Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst – explained how to:

• Identify which issues require urgent attention and/or escalation
• Build an incident response team comprising trusted stakeholders across your institution
• Develop your own robust incident response process
• Spot “early warning signs” from online conversations

Read on for her top takeaways.

What Exactly is Issues Management?

Rachael and her boss, the Associate Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications, form the issues management team at UMass Amherst. To be clear, this is a very different role from crisis management; it’s not about being an emergency responder, student conduct officer, or PR spokesperson. Instead, think of Rachael as an internal crisis communications consultant with just one client, tasked with:

• Looking ahead to emerging trends
• Anticipating/uncovering disruptive topics
• Gathering relevant details
• Confirming, coordinating, and sharing
• Aggregating and consolidating verified info
• Communicating externally (as needed)

“Our success is really dependent on two words: coordination and communication,” Rachael explained. “Because listening without coordination is just eavesdropping. Listening with purpose – that’s strategy.”

Issues vs Crises: What’s the Difference?

While they sound similar, issues and crises differ in timing, scope, and outcomes. As Rachael noted, it was the difference between tracking federal policies – that could be proactive issues management – versus tracking a snowstorm, which requires reactive crisis management.

Let’s take a deeper look at the contrast between the two disciplines:

For a practical demonstration, consider three scenarios:

• An alarm going off in a dorm
• A religious gathering led by a popular preacher
• A rumor about rescinding admission offers

The first – the dorm alarm – clearly fits into the category of a crisis (although, from an issues management perspective, you’d still want to pay attention to what people are saying about it).

As for the two remaining examples, we need to ask ourselves a few more questions before proceeding with a response:

• Is the incident an actual or potential emergency, physical threat, or hazard in which normal operations are likely to be disrupted and immediate action is required to save and protect lives or property?
• Does the incident or issue pose a significant risk to long-term campus well-being and/or reputation?
• Does the issue or incident require immediate intervention to continue normal operations, protect reputation, and/or preserve trust with important stakeholder groups?

As it transpires, after speaking to campus partners, the religious event has actually been pre-approved. After checking in, it’s clear that the gathering is friendly and informative, and that students are engaged with the speaker, so no further action is required.

Meanwhile, having tracked down information about the rescinded admission offers, it actually refers to another school with a similar name, so it’s important to correct the record.

“We’re trying to discover what people are really worried about,” Rachael commented. “Which concerns keep resurfacing among the community members? What narratives are taking hold that can reshape perception about our institution?”

By this point, it should be clear whether or not an incident is, indeed, an “issue” that requires immediate attention. If so, it’s time to organize your incident response team (IRT).

Creating an Incident Response Team

UMass Amherst has created a cross-functional response team to address issues like those we discussed in the previous section, composed of leadership, student affairs, facilities, communications, and first responders.

“The IRT’s mission is to anticipate, avert, and mitigate issues that could disrupt operations or harm the university’s reputation,” Rachael explained. “It provides fast, well-informed guidance to university leadership, and it’s activated when an incident arises beyond the scope of a single department or office.”

Developing an Incident Response Process

As well as building a dedicated incident response team, UMass Amherst has created a process to guide incident response, covering three steps:

• Understand: Gather details through networks and on-campus experts
• Discuss: Assess the scope, evaluate the risk, and decide on values-aligned actions
• Report: Brief leadership and carries out the coordinated response as planned

Those top-level steps can be further broken down into the following phases:

This process allows the team to detect potential reputational issues, assess their impact, determine which parts of the university might be affected, loop in relevant members of the IRT, and pin down all the necessary facts.

Having gathered its findings, the team then shares accurate information through internal and external communication briefs and platforms, such as the institution’s Federal Actions hub. Whenever they share a new update, they also send out links to the relevant information via community emails and social channels like LinkedIn and Instagram Stories.

The final step involves reviewing the team’s actions to assess performance and identify potential improvements that may affect future issues.

Beyond this process, Rachael explained that the IRT also holds a so-called “horizon scan” meeting at least once per semester to review cultural, political, and social trends – including potential state or federal policy changes, plus emerging topics on platforms like Reddit. They even consider the actions of other higher ed institutions. “Those proactive postures mean that when something does happen, we’re rarely caught off guard.”

Identifying Early Warning Signs

As you can see, issue management is largely about spotting early warning signs that can develop into something more serious. In this section, we’ll examine two UMass Amherst case studies that demonstrate how it all plays out in the real world.

Case Study: ICE Campus Rumor

Reports that ICE agents were on campus began circulating on social media channels. Because Rachael and her team were monitoring the institution’s social channels in real time, they saw these rumors taking off almost immediately.

As we know, part of the issues management process is to track down the truth behind an issue, so the IRT group began fact-checking the reports. It emerged that while there was a person from the federal government on campus, they weren’t an ICE agent at all – they were a Department of Defense agent conducting a standard background check for a student applying to a federal position.

In response, the IRT held an internal briefing to share the verified details and posted updates via email and social media explaining that the university was not aware of any ICE presence on campus to date. They also contacted international student services to ensure students had accurate information and support.

“Without that rapid social listening, it could have easily turned into multi-day campus panic, but we were able to jump in on the message and stem the flow,” said Rachael. “We were also able to provide a lot of resources to our community that were actually verified by people on campus.”

Case Study: Federal Visa Policy Changes

When the federal government announced new visa scrutiny rules, including the possible monitoring of non-citizens’ social media activity, conversations among international students spiked.

Some asked questions about whether their previous posts could get them deported and whether it was still safe to share their research online. Others shared information – some accurate, some misleading – about how many students had their visas revoked, what was happening in the international community, and what resources people could access.

Because Rachael and her team were closely monitoring these social media conversations, they moved quickly by collaborating with relevant internal teams, such as the Office of General Counsel, to pull together factual guidance and reassurance, including links to legal resources, counseling, and immigration assistance.

“It wasn’t a flashy response,” said Rachael. “It was quiet, empathetic, and informative, and that’s exactly what our community needed.”

Final Thoughts

While each of those case studies is different, UMass Amherst’s response was consistently bound by the same framework. In all three instances, they:

• Filtered out the noise and defined clear criteria for escalation
• Coordinated with trusted internal partners across the university, enabling a rapid response
• Shared actionable information with the leadership team
• Communicated clearly using easily adaptable messaging templates

“If you can master those four steps, you stop being just a social media manager,” Rachael explained. “You become an intelligence team, a trusted partner that helps shape institutional strategy. So the next time you’re scrolling through your institution’s mentions, remember: you’re not just managing a feed – you’re managing foresight.”

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Featured image by Freepik.