In this episode of Public Safety Now, hear how a Michigan PSAP leverages social media to augment and support its community safety strategies. Grand Traverse 911 Deputy Director Leah Hornacek shares some tips and tricks for emergency communications agencies around the globe.
JW: Hi, and thanks for tuning into Public Safety Now on HxGN Radio. I’m your host, John Whitehead, Vice President of Sales for U.S. Public Safety here at Hexagon’s Safety & Infrastructure division. So, we all know about this next topic. Everyone could look down at their phones right now and see some type of social media app on their device. So, whether you’re into Facebook or you’re into Twitter, maybe on the business side, you’re into LinkedIn, you might do the Snapchat thing, there’s all types of social media apps out there that we’re all pretty familiar with. Our guest today is Leah, and I’m going to have her introduce herself. She’s the deputy director at Grand Traverse. And I’m going to have her introduce herself. And this is kind of what the conversation is going to be about. How does social media play within the 9-1-1 space, emergency services? And how can we better utilise that as a tool for being able to respond quicker and easier as we’re going out to these incidents? So, Leah, congratulations, and welcome to the call.
LH: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. My name is Leah Hornacek. I am the deputy director of Grand Traverse 911, which is in the northern part of Michigan. And I’ve been here just over 13 years. I started as a dispatcher and have worked my way up.
JW: Very nice. That is great. I love hearing those types of stories because you know what it’s like starting off being the new person, sitting there, going through the training and having this world of technology kind of sitting in front of you. So, I always love hearing that whenever I talk to directors and deputy directors like yourself that says, you know what? Been there, done that, started and worked my way through. So, that is great. As I said at the beginning, we’re focusing really on the social media aspect and how that plays into emergency services. But why you? Why are we talking to Leah about this? What kind of makes you the expert here in this 9-1-1 space?
LH: I’m not sure. I think it was by accident. You know, I work for not a large PSAP and not a tiny PSAP but a smaller communications centre, like I said, in northern Michigan. We have a population in our county of about 95,000, and probably back in 2011, 2012, maybe even earlier than that, working the midnight shift, we kind of started to realise that people weren’t getting their information or their news from the news on TV. They were getting it from social media. And, so, we wanted to jump in on that bandwagon. We thought that maybe we could start putting out information or getting people information quicker at all hours of the night if we would hop on the social media bandwagon. And it was not easy at first. Our administration at the time really, I mean, nobody really knew how to manage it, right? It was this huge thing that the possibilities were endless, are endless. And, so, it took a while for us, as floor staff, to convince our administration that this would be a good idea. And throughout the course of these years of having a social media presence with our population of 95,000, we have roughly 54,000 followers now, and we’re able to push out a lot of information, really, really timely, accurate information. And we’ve kind of become a—not kind of—we have become a trusted source in our community.
JW: So, over the years, I mean, you guys started this in 2011, 2012. So, over the last eight to nine years, you’ve got more than 50 percent of your population is tuning in, if you will, or at least subscribing to your social media accounts.
LH: They are. Yep.
JW: That’s interesting. So, I’m assuming that it started off probably the way most people are sitting here thinking: how can I start using social media within a public safety organisation and be able to roll that type of programme out? I mean, there’s all types of—everybody’s going to start thinking of the liability side. What if something goes out that shouldn’t go out? What if someone says something? How did you even start down that road?
LH: We started with one simple post that said, “This is our Facebook page, and this is where we’ll post information as we can or as appropriate.” And that obviously doesn’t get very much attention. So, the next part did come by accident. We had a dam failure in our community, where thousands of people were affected, and they needed information really fast. The flood sirens at the time were either not working or didn’t go off in a timely fashion. Alerts from the National Weather Service were intermittent. And, so, we started posting everything that we could about this flood and this dam failure on our Facebook page. And we started seeing people following, following, following, following. And we knew then that it was something that was going to be good for us because we could push this information out and everybody was getting the same message efficiently. And then it was another weather incident. We called it “snowmageddon” around here, where we had about 36 to 42 inches of snow, depending on where you were, in less than 36 hours. So, we were literally snowed in. We had people coming to work on snowmobiles. That’s the only way that you could get through the county. And it was a mess. However, we were able to communicate with people about utilities, about resources, about what was going on and what was available. And that’s when we really saw that jump in the following. And, so, it was—we made it our priority to start posting things that would affect a greater part of the population as much as we possibly could.
JW: Interesting. Yeah, you know, it never ceases to amaze me how some type of event, good or bad, some type of event is the pivot point for change. And it sounds like that’s exactly what happened here, right? Unfortunately, it had to take a dam failure, it had to take a “snowmageddon,” as you call it, but some type of event that was really going to affect people both personally and their property—
LH: Exactly.
JW: —seemed to seem to grab their attention. So, okay. So, now you’ve got this in place, and it sounds like you’re pushing data out and you’re giving updates. And the subscribers, they’re going to get an update whenever you guys push something out. How are you guys working like when people start asking, then? Because I’m assuming you allow for comments and kind of to where it’s a two-way conversation. Did you utilise that? And how did you kind of integrate that part of it?
LH: So, in the beginning, we did not. It was a this is for informational purposes only. Here’s what we’re putting out. It is what it is. Contact your utilities if you have utility questions. Contact these resources if you have questions, references, resources. Now I think that we definitely are seeing a change in how that’s working. It becomes beneficial to have a two-way conversation when it’s appropriate. It’s not something that we’ve completely embraced yet all the time. In times of disaster, we will. We’ll open up that message feature, or we’ll have someone dedicated to those comments to see what’s going on. But we make it very clear and we post regularly on our page that this is for information only. We do not take complaints. We do not take, you know—we really, time permitting, we barely, barely can dedicate someone to answer the questions that come in, just because the people who post for us are our floor supervisors and they are working supervisors. So, they’re answering the telephone. They’re responding to units.
JW: So, you’re doing this like crawl, walk, run type of approach to this, where you kind of started off slow. Give one way, you know, push out. It sounds like now you’re in the walk phase over the last eight years, where now people can kind of bring it in and respond accordingly. But you’re still giving that warning. If you have an emergency, call 9-1-1. You’re not keep having people out there. So, I’m assuming you guys have put some best practises, some policies in place as you started this crawl and then walk – at least getting through those areas. Did you find that there was assistance out in the emergency services field? Have other departments, other agencies kind of picked up on this and were you able to piggyback with that, or did you feel that you guys were out there on your own and had to start from ground zero?
LH: We were out there on our own, especially in terms of the 9-1-1 centre having a social media page and having the following that we did, which, you know, after natural disasters and things happening, the next thing we added to our page was a personality. We let people know out there that it was a human being making these posts, answering these questions, answering your 9-1-1 calls. And that seemed to really resonate with people. They were like, “Oh, man. It’s not a robot. It’s not a computer service. When I dial this number, it’s an actual human being.” When we’re putting these status updates out there, you know, maybe we’re using movie quotes or song lyrics that everybody can relate to. And, so, you start this friendship, basically, with your community, and they look to you for information in terms of policies and procedures. It was a lot of trial and error. Luckily, we haven’t put anything out there that has made people mad. We don’t violate any laws in terms of putting information out there, or anything like that. But it was a lot of, what can we put out? What do people really need to know? And they know that we’re not the police of that. But sometimes it’s just—you have a small accident – it might not be worth putting up. But if you have one that’s blocking the roadway or the roadway is shut down for four to six hours, we’re going to post that because it’s going to affect a big part of the population. And, so, figuring out those little intricacies of what was important, what do people really want to know, what do they need to hear, and then building on that, what education pieces can we put out there? We have big ones every year that we’ll put out about 9-1-1 misdials, butt dials, pocket dials, purse dials, whatever you want to call them. People still don’t know how or why or the frequency of what they happen. And we find that when we do put those education pieces out there, our numbers will decline. People will start checking their phones and be like, “Oh, I called. I didn’t mean to call.” Or they actually stay on the line and talk to us and be like, “No, it was a mistake. I’m sorry.” And, so, we’re finding that a lot of those pieces go a long way, and we try to incorporate those more and more.
JW: So, that’s kind of a cool thing to where you’re educating the community as well. So, you’re not just providing them information that could affect them, like a weather event or something like that. That’s one part of it. But you’re also using it then for ongoing educational purposes, you know, for proper usage of 9-1-1, for proper usage, really, of anything within the emergency services field. I like that. That’s probably got a lot of attention just in itself, because, man, it still amazes me how many people I talk to that don’t understand how to use 9-1-1 effectively. I mean, I’ll tell you, I’ve got family—now, I’ve been in emergency services most of my life. I mean, 13 years old, I started as a volunteer firefighter, junior firefighter. And then I got into the 9-1-1 thing in the mid ‘90s. All of the things that we’ve talked about and I’ve talked about over the years, it amazes me that, I mean, I’ll have close family that will say, “Yeah, I had to take so-and-so to the hospital.” “Oh, what happened?” “Well, he was having difficulty breathing,” and I’m making this up, difficulty breathing. “He just wasn’t feeling well and little tightness in the chest.” And it’s like, “Well, did you call 9-1-1?” “Oh, no, no, no. Why would I call 9-1-1? I just took him to the hospital.” “Well, you might want to call 9-1-1.” “No, no, no, no. I don’t want to bother them.” Oh, my gosh. That education piece is huge, and it sounds like you’re doing that.
LH: Yeah. We’re trying. Right now, we’ve had text to 9-1-1 for a few years now. I think since 2017. But we’ll have intermittent 9-1-1 outage issues, and we’ll post up there, “Text to 9-1-1 is still functionable.” “Wait. You can text 9-1-1?” “Yes. You’ve been able to. Please do. It’s giving you other avenues. It’s great. It’s a great resource.” And so, yeah, the education piece has been good for us.
We’ll do both, you know, things like text to 9-1-1, 9-1-1 hang ups, but we’ll also try to head off calls. So, if we know that we have a big event coming into town and we know it’s going to generate a certain, a large amount of a certain call type. For example, we have a really large festival that shuts down our town, the city of Traverse City, which is where our dispatch centre is. There’s roughly 17,000 people. We have this festival that brings in 250,000 to 500,000 people over the course of a week. And, so, they shut down streets and cars get towed. And we’ll, I mean, we’ll get 50 to 150 calls saying, “My car’s been stolen.” “Well, it hasn’t been stolen. You parked it on a parade route, and here’s where we moved them to.” And, so, we’ll try to head off those calls with pieces like that as well. And our community really is appreciative. And there’s always going to be people that have an opinion and may not have the nicest thing to say, but kind of the coolest thing that I’ve seen throughout the course of this is your followers, especially your loyal ones, and there will be a lot, they fight your battles for you. And it doesn’t get nasty. They just, you know, “Hey, they’re providing a service, and we appreciate it. Keep your comments to yourself.” And so, our people—but we don’t. We don’t police the comments for that. We don’t have to.
JW: That’s interesting because as we all know, we’re in a world now where social media sometimes, you know, you got these, what are they, armchair quarterbacks?
LH: Oh, yeah.
JW: You know, everyone’s got a keyboard. And man, people can just be as tough and as big and bad as they need to be online. It’s great, though, to hear that you guys have got a system set up in your community where they’re almost policing themselves.
LH: They do.
JW: And that might be a testament to you guys, right? Because you’ve set up a system that is informational, that’s educational, that’s not violating anyone’s privacy.
LH: Nope, never.
JW: That’s not, you know, Oh, I don’t have to worry about my 9-1-1 call being on there. But it’s just great to hear that the community has kind of embraced that and they kind of self-monitor that and that you’ve had success with that. That is definitely great to hear. So, with that, you guys have now got some pretty good policies set in place. So, for anyone that’s out there listening, whether it’s a police department, a fire department, 9-1-1 agency, they may be considering this, but some of them might be looking at this, going, “Yeah, well, we don’t want it to start at ground zero.” What are some guidance that you could kind of help out for other agencies to learn?
LH: Have guidelines. There are plenty of resources out there. NENA has a standard document right now, which it’s a little dated, but they are working on it, on just some standards and best practises. But have guidelines for your page: what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable, what actually your agency is actually going to put out there and so that people know what they can expect from you. Have those and post them. We try to post ours annually. We have all of our, like, our non-emergent telephone numbers. Obviously, 9-1-1’s for emergencies only. We will post that as well just as a reminder. “Hey, this is our non-emergent line,” especially if it seems like we’re getting a lot of those non-emergent calls on 9-1-1 lines. We try to be consistent in reminding people that that’s out there. We do have a set of rules. No profanity. This is a community page. We will post those once or twice a year, just to give people a reminder, and especially that we don’t take complaints via social media. Having those available on your page and then posting them sporadically throughout the course of the year, just to give people a reminder, is a really good idea because we, I think in the, I want to say, in the last eight years we’ve had two people try to attempt to report something, seriously report something, via Facebook. How about eight years? That’s not horrible.
JW: No, no, that’s not horrible. But, you know, that’s where my mind immediately went was my kids, for example, and they’re 22 and 24 now. But for the last several years, they’re more comfortable on their device than they are picking up the phone and calling. I always jokingly say, you know, they’re like, oh, well, I’ll tell text so-and-so, or I’ll send so-and-so a message and get that information. I’m like, well, why don’t you just call them? And they look at me like, why would I call them? I mean, so there’s a lot of people that are more comfortable, a huge part of the population, that are more comfortable sending in a post or updating a post in social media. So, where do you guys see that going? I mean, you said that you don’t have anyone regularly watching it, but I see that maybe being the crawl, walk, run. That’s the run, right?
LH: It absolutely—yeah. It absolutely will be. And it will be just like everything else in the 9-1-1 industry, it’ll come in at different times for different areas. I know New York has an entire team. They have digital communications officers, DCOs, and that is what they do. That is how they handle complaints is through social media and digital means, and that is their sole job. If you have the ability to do that, awesome. Awesome. But there are some places that just don’t.
JW: Yeah. And to that point, there’s a cost factor. Once you set that as the bar, people are going to expect it. And now all of a sudden you could have 95,000 population using that regularly. You’ve got to be prepared for that. That’s not something that you can just jump into lightly, it sounds like.
LH: True. I will say for a lot of that, and this is just my personal opinion, when somebody is really experiencing that 9-1-1 emergency where they really need it, they don’t really want to wait for a text message back either or some sort of response back. And, so, I think that’s the benefit of using the telephone and actually speaking to a person because you’re getting that instant connection, which they want. But there are times when that’s not possible or it’s not appropriate. So, this will definitely, you know, text messaging is already picking up and taking off and has been for a while. But social media will be the next one that really, I think, moves forward.
JW: I agree. And I think it’s interesting that the social media aspect of it is something people are comfortable with. I mean, I can tell you that even myself, I catch myself in like a Facebook Messenger type of set up where there’s multiple people texting. It’s a conversation going on – myself, my brother, my sister. You know, we maybe have something that we’re planning long-term. Texting almost seems like it’s more of a hindrance because one might have an iPhone, the another one might have an Android. And, oh, there’s all these things. Using these commercial off-the-shelf systems just becomes natural. It just becomes part of the process. So, yeah, I see—
LH: Yeah. Puts everybody on a level playing field, for sure.
JW: It does, right? And texting to 9-1-1 is more than that. I’ve often joked that, you know, we in the emergency industries have said the term next gen now for so long that I don’t know when this next is going to happen, but maybe it’s now gen, right?
LH: It is, yeah.
JW: Because, I mean, we’re using it now. And I don’t know what happens next, but let me tell you, next gen has been here for a while. So, it’s interesting to see. Any success stories, anything you can share from your social media? The usage that you guys are kind of just—you continue to use it as a success story?
LH: You know, really, our biggest success stories are always when we have, like I said, when we throw the personality in there – when we are real with our people. We’ve had a couple of situations where, unfortunately, we’ve had some drug activity in the area, where we posted about it. “Hey, this is happening, and this is what we’re dealing with right now,” whether it’s multiple overdoses or something of that nature. Like you said, we don’t post names. We don’t post locations when it’s something that sensitive. But “This is what’s going on. And if you know anybody that’s in this particular situation,” It was a bad batch of heroin. I mean, every batch is bad, right? But this one was legitimately killing people. And, so, we said, “Hey, this is what’s going on. We’re working back-to-back overdoses. Back to back to back. If you know anybody in the community that is struggling, here are the resources. Reach out to them, encourage them to reach out to somebody.” And I think it was showing some compassion and some empathy and some feelings towards this situation and that there is help out there, that went a really long way with our community, as unfortunate as the situation was. And, so, to get that message out there and to put those resources out there, it was something that we could do while we were doing our regular job here.
JW: Yeah, that’s a great example. I mean, because, you know, I mean, emergency services, we get a little jaded on our side. And I know the public, they get a little jaded on their side. And if all of a sudden you guys are posting information for people that are suffering with an addiction and they’re suffering with a serious drug habit, and now all of a sudden you’re posting information that says, “Hey, heads up. But your drugs could be worse for you than what they just normally are,” what a way to really kind of help a community of all levels. I mean, some people might look at that and say, “Doesn’t apply. Move on.” That’s the beauty of it. Just keep scrolling.
LH: Exactly.
JW: For others, it could be in that thing where “I’ve got someone in my family that struggles with addiction. They need to know, and they need to understand this.” And so that’s kind of a cool way of turning a negative into a positive, if you will, and be able to use that.
LH: And we know what the resources are; our community should know what they are as well. So, throwing those out there and giving people more knowledge, that was a good one for us. We also, sometimes, we’ll post how busy we were throughout the course of a typical day, maybe how many 9-1-1 hang ups we’ve had; or how many accidents we’ve had; or if road conditions are bad, how many calls we’ve been taking, and maybe people do need to slow down or stay inside. And we can’t give that order to tell people to stay home. But the more real you can be with what’s actually happening in the moment, more people might look at that and say, “Oh, okay, well, maybe I can wait 20 minutes or 30 minutes, or maybe I can take a different route.” And, so, anything that we can do to help. We also have a lot of success with things that are funny. So, we’ll get those random calls where we have jets that fly into town. There’s a couple of bases around us in the area, but they’ll use our airport to refuel, and people will think that something is going on. So, they, of course, they don’t know who to call. So, they call 9-1-1. And we’ll throw Top Gun references in there, you know? Maverick and Goose is circling the tower. Putting a little spin on it. But it stops the calls into the dispatch centre as well because of that Facebook page.
JW: Yeah. And it’s a great way of just getting information out there, keeping it light. You guys are probably, you need to work hard. It’s like everything else, right? There’s a fine line between inappropriate and a little bit of humour. So, you know, I’m assuming you guys have found where that line is and make sure that you’re not offending anybody, but you’re definitely using a little keeping it light to where people still get the information that they need but maybe put a smile on some people’s faces as they read it.
LH: It’s exactly that.
JW: Very cool. Now, okay, my local agency here is connected up to the CAD system. And when a call comes in and it meets a certain criteria—they do Twitter and they’re also on Facebook, too, but this is an automatic Twitter push that comes out. So, it’s not a live person—but it’ll say, “This agency going to this block range for a house fire or a suspicious person.” And again, it has to meet certain criteria, but they’re utilising that. Have you guys looked at anything on that to be able to you again give out information, it’s more automated?
LH: So, we, in the very beginning, we did try that with a particular programme, and we found that people just kept scrolling. I mean, they would look, and they would like it, but there wasn’t the interaction and there wasn’t the share factor we’re seeing with our posts – not to mention that we utilise Facebook. Our stuff automatically posts to Twitter. But with Facebook, we can update those posts. So, when people look at them or when they’ve been shared, we update the original post. We don’t make a new one to say, “This has been cleared.” We update the original one so that original shared information is updated throughout the course of the event. And people don’t have to search for that timeline or wonder, “Is something still in progress? Is this still going on? Is this road still closed?” It’s all updated within the original content of that first post.
JW: Oh, that’s nice. Yeah. So, you don’t have to worry about, you know, having multiple. I don’t have to scroll through hundreds of lines of stuff. I can find what I need and be able to do that. No, that’s absolutely a good way of doing that. I laughed because when I first subscribed to this and when I was at my agency here locally, we did not do this. I don’t even know if Twitter was a word back then. But what I like about it is I kind of said, I remember being a kid, you know, multiple family members, including my mom and dad, had a scanner. They had a scanner sitting in their living room. And everything that went across it was set across the air. Man, they would—vehicle accidents. I remember getting my licence at 16 years old, and I’d get to my friend’s house, and all of a sudden the phone would ring. My mom will be like, “Hey, we heard an accident on this road. Are you okay?” “Yeah. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” But it was that way of kind of keeping in touch. And I laugh because I say these social media announcements, now that we’ve got, the way the scanner has kind of gone, you know, it’s not working anymore. We’ve got tighter security. We’ve got next-gen radios. Yeah. Not everybody is listening in on the old CB or scanner anymore in most areas. This is the way of keeping people in the loop and allowing my mom to stay current with what’s going on in emergency services around. So, it’s a neat way of doing it. Now, are you guys monitoring social media? In other words, from a—everyone’s probably heard the stories, but you listen to Boston police who utilise Twitter, for example, after the bombings, to really start looking for any type of patterns or information. They were having pictures and video sent in. Are you guys using it in a reverse way?
LH: Not currently. However, that is something that definitely has crossed our desks and something that we’ve looked into. But how to manage that for us, for a smaller centre that might only have two people working at a time, that’s what’s tough with social media. I think you have to take it on with what you can handle at the time and build from there. And we just might be at a point where, okay, this is where we are until we can figure out what we can afford, frankly, as well, but what we can dedicate time to and what we can dedicate a person to, that might be something down the road for us, for sure.
JW: But it’s something you guys are looking into. But to your point, you don’t want to jump into the deep end and then find yourself unable to keep up with it.
LH: Right. Building that expectation and not being able to fulfill it.
JW: Yep, no, for sure. So, okay, last topic, and this, I think, is a big one. We talk, we say this word so often on this podcast, but I think just in emergency services in general is change management. I would assume that there is going to be people listening to this or there’s people that are out there considering this and they’re in there rolling their eyes. They’re like, “Oh, that’s the last thing I need is a Facebook dump to be able to have this type of thing.” You know, public safety professionals, we’re always looking for new technology, we’re always looking for the latest and greatest and trying to get out there, and I don’t want to say bleeding edge, but try to stay current, but yet protect ourselves, right? Not open things up to where now we’re going to fail with it. So, for those that might be rolling their eyes or saying, “You know what, this isn’t going to work here,” how can we talk to them about embracing something like this and really bringing in a change management aspect to this that says, “You know what, it’s okay. We’re going to be okay. But here’s a way that you can better offer a service back to the public and your constituents.” How would we go about doing that?
LH: I think you have to look at, and I think that these people would want to look at, how it’s going to benefit them first, right? So, you want to look at the success stories, the benefits of having a social media page, whether it’s, like I said before, the reducing the amount of 9-1-1 misdials that you have to spend time investigating because you can’t just let those go. Those have decreased for us. Another thing that’s happened that has been great is you’re working a huge event, and the last phone call that you want to answer, and I know they’re just trying to provide a service, is the media. “Hey, I heard this on the scanner. I heard this on an app. Can you tell me what’s going on?” Our calls have been eliminated with that. Our news does not call us. And in fact, if you look at all the media outlets in our county, most of their news stories will start with, “According to Grand Traverse 911’s Facebook page,” “According to Grand Traverse 911,” and they’re taking it solely from our social media. We do not field those calls anymore.
JW: So, you know, if you’re in an organisation and you’re trying to be a change agent, it sounds like there are some benefits in timesaving, not even getting into the whole relationship aspect of it, but just for the sake of time and keeping your dispatch staff, your police officers, and those responding focused on the actual incident and less on the ancillary work that normally comes in the door. It sounds like that’s really an area to focus on, that that’s going to be some of the benefits that they can start seeing.
LH: Yeah, that was really something that we saw and the education piece as well of all the other, what 9-1-1 is for, that we have text to 9-1-1, getting those resources out there to our public so that they didn’t have to tie up 9-1-1 lines or even sometimes our non-emergency lines for things like that. That has been a really big benefit for us, and that’s something that I would definitely look at. And then next comes the relationship with your community, becoming a trusted resource and giving your agency a personality and identity, letting people know that it’s human beings in your community answering these phone calls. It really makes a big difference we’ve noticed. And, so, there’s a lot of positives that come out of it. And then the opportunity to grow with that. What if you have the next big idea? What if you start this and you notice something throughout the course of your community or with the technology there you’re using that you can be the next trailblazer or a trendsetter or come up with some totally different procedure that may benefit your centre? Those possibilities, they come around pretty often.
JW: Yeah. And the only way we’re going to do that is by accepting some newness into our workflow, being open, and going, and we say this a lot, don’t be afraid to just try something new. I mean, at the very least, now you got a Facebook page, and okay, fine. Maybe you close off the comments. I think that what you guys have done is just great because you’ve taken your agency, 95,000 population up there, and you guys kind of set in place something—and this is years ago—you guys set in place for the rest of us to kind of be able to build off of and learn. And I love that crawl before you walk type of set up that you guys did, because it basically just says, you don’t have to meet all expectations day one. Just kind of start it, roll it out slow, and then just see where it goes from there, is kind of the way it sounds.
LH: And it does not happen overnight. I mean, those big events help, but it does not happen overnight. So, a little bit of patience goes a long way as well.
JW: Yep. You don’t have to be on a snowmobile or have a dam breakage for this to be successful, is what you’re saying. So, no, no—
LH: You do not, no.
JW: That’s good. For those down south that are Googling snowmobile right now, that’s a whole other thing.
LH: I know. Snow machines, snowmobile, yeah.
JW: Yeah, yeah. Look it up. They are a blast, I’m sure. Well, Leah, thank you very much. It has been a pleasure talking with you. I’ve learnt a lot. I think our listeners have learnt a lot here. And again, I think that there’s a lot of good information. You talked about NENA, having some guidelines as you go out and utilising social media. And I think that’s the way to go. Let’s learn this together and keep kind of pushing things forward, because I think not only does it help the community, but more importantly, it helps us, right—
LH: Absolutely.
JW: —in emergency services, just be that much better and that much together with the information that we’re sharing.
LH: Absolutely.
JW: Very cool. Well, thank you once again. I appreciate your time. And to hear additional episodes or learn more, visit us at hxgnspotlight.com. And thanks for tuning in.
