Mass email risk communication: Lessons learned from COVID-19-triggered campus-wide evictions in Canada and the United States

by Haorui Wu

From an out-of-province/state and international post-secondary student perspective, this article (a) explores mass email risk communication facilitation during the COVID-19-triggered campus-wide evictions in Canada and the United States; and (b) develops relative recommendations to improve mass email risk communication strategies for future emergency response. Investigating mass email risk communication-related impacts on students in a tertiary educational context has revealed a significant deficit in emergency response research, practice, and policymaking. Mandatory temporary university and college closures during the COVID-19 first wave provided an opportunity to address this research and practice deficit, as most Canadian and American universities/colleges administered their eviction communication via daily mass email chains. Through a phenomenological lens, this study interviewed twenty out-of-province/state and international students, ten from each country respectively, to examine student eviction experiences associated with intensive mass email risk communication. This research identified four factors linked to mass email risk communication: email chain characteristics, student interpretation, interdepartmental cooperation, and frontline voices. Synthesizing these findings, four evidence-based recommendations were developed: to efficiently convey risk information to students, to understand student perceptions and to inform their behaviors, to enhance interdepartmental cooperation, and to enable mutual dialogue in decision making. These recommendations could assist post-secondary institutions, and other organizations, in strengthening their mass email risk communication strategies and advancing organizational emergency response plans for future extreme events.