On Sun, 5 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote:
There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or call in. I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that call in.
It's a High School. They don't have a "support desk" (or more than handful of phone lines [1]). Even the local radio station can't cope with one call per school asking them to broadcast the news that they have closed due to bad weather.
If your resources are that tight, do what our local school district did, mandate that all bus schedules will only be available on the web site.
And then make sure something gets posted to the website.
Unfortunately, the number of students polling the website for news means it can't cope with the traffic. I don't believe they can justify paying more for better web hosting, just to manage this once-a-year half hour event.
Roland, sounds like you should have a few "public service" announcements saying that school closures will be delivered via a certain twitter username. Also send a flyer home with the students. The radio station can pick up the twitter feed like everyone else, and announce closures. That is the way a certain group of people are doing it in the middle east right now, word gets around and word gets out... In your case, the community will know quickly, all from a couple of people logging into twitter and sending a few messages. Sounds like a simple, ideal solution given your budget constraints. -- steve