On Campus Podcast – RealResponse: Anonymous Reporting on College Campuses

Ed Butch: Welcome to On Campus with CITI Program, the podcast where we explore the complexities of the campus experience with higher education experts and researchers. I’m your host, Ed Butch, and I’m thrilled to have you with us today. Before we get started, I want to quickly note that this podcast is for educational purposes only and is not designed to provide legal advice or guidance. In addition, the views expressed in this podcast are solely those of our guests. Today’s guest is David Chadwick, founder and CEO of RealResponse. Welcome to the podcast, David.

David Chadwick: Thanks, Ed. I appreciate you having me. It’s an honor to be here.

Ed Butch: Of course. Thank you. So this episode is actually the second interview with David. So if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend listening to my colleague Daniel Smith’s On Tech Ethics podcast for his other interview as well. Either way, if you’ve listened or not yet, you’re in for some great information on this episode. So before we jump into our full conversation, David, can you give just kind of a quick overview of yourself and your background in RealResponse, just in case some of the listeners haven’t listened to that other episode yet?

David Chadwick: Sure. So RealResponse is a platform focused on what we like to say, elevating voices, making it easier for people to be able to communicate within their organization without a fear of retaliation and really breaking down barriers, but most importantly, meeting them with where they like to communicate, making communication efficient, fast, and in a manner that they’re comfortable with. That could be along a number of different areas. It could be communicating questions, it could be communicating more general feedback, suggestions, but certainly it could be concerns and issues that someone would like to address as well across a number of different areas. We work with many different groups, so college athletic departments, professional sports leagues and clubs, Olympic national governing bodies, integrity groups, universities, campus wide, outside of their athletic departments, and even some other youth serving organizations as well.

I started the company, this is hard to believe, over a decade ago as a former student athlete. My sport is generally pretty obvious when I walk into the room because I’m six, nine. It’s a pretty quick giveaway that I played basketball. I guess it could have been volleyball or swimming as well.

Ed Butch: True. True.

David Chadwick: But yeah, I started the company while I was still a student athlete. I was taking a class on entrepreneurship, had no idea what entrepreneurship was, but I knew the class settled my credit that I needed to get to graduate. And at the time I saw a pretty consistent need among my student athlete population and peers of frustration, feeling like they had no way to speak up, no way to use their voice, no way to share concerns, et cetera. And administrators also validated me too when I began to interview them, that they had frustrations on their side, right? We do exit interviews on the way out or we ask someone how the last however many years went, or we try to do a survey and no one participates.

So during that class I interviewed over 200 athletic directors, and to put that in context, there’s over 300 division one AD. So it was a huge sample size and I heard enough validation that there was something worth going to pursue here. So decided to chase after this endeavor, obviously, and have been proud over the last decade to watch our platform evolve really with a couple of key focuses. We’ve talked about the anonymous communication. We also have a survey instrument that’s leveraged by a lot of our partners to do kind of more of a holistic evaluation, and then also helping our partners document better with our documentation repository. So if they are having meetings and conversations and incidents are happening, getting things away from pen and paper and emails and spreadsheet and having everything in one succinct place. So again, very diverse group of organizations we work with, several different products, but it’s been really amazing to stay true to our mission and that’s providing that safe space for people to speak up and to be able to help those in need.

Ed Butch: That’s awesome. Well, as the listeners know, I’ve said, I think in both episodes so far, I come from a higher education background. I worked on multiple university campuses for many years, so I love hearing that founding story. And I think a lot of our faculty, staff, and student listeners can all understand and can get behind just finding that class that fits the credit. But the fact that you fell in love with it I think is just fantastic. So that’s great.

David Chadwick: Yeah. I will say I got a B in the class, so I was really good at the ideas. I wasn’t as good as the homework.

Ed Butch: All right. Well hey, a B is not bad at all. And the fact that you were able to get out there and survey 200 athletic directors, that’s fantastic, especially as an undergraduate.

David Chadwick: I really appreciate when I reached out to people and it wasn’t a sales pitch, I just said, “Hey, I’m a current student and I’d love to interview you for 15 minutes.” And the vast majority were really receptive to that. So I think it speaks volumes just to administration and people wanting to invest in the college student and making sure that they’re able to launch their career. So I’m very much appreciative for that time and people’s opportunity.

Ed Butch: That’s great. Well, I mean I have an idea based on what you said your background was, but obviously listening to what you said and having looked at your website, a large majority of your clients tend to be athletic teams or different athletic organizations, including at the university level. Because of your background, was there a specific push that that was the population that you wanted to focus on? Or did that just kind of come about as you were really putting this idea together?

David Chadwick: It was absolutely because of my background initially, and it was because what I knew well, right? It was my own personal experience and it was what I had seen firsthand. So starting in the collegiate athletics space made sense because I was a division one athlete and I knew the challenges and I knew the process. So that was our initial push and Ed, we stayed there exclusively for goodness, five years roughly. I always had in the back of my mind that there was an opportunity to go beyond college athletics, wasn’t sure the right way to do it, but I knew that the types of things that college athletic departments dealt with were not unique to college athletics. They were going on all over the world.

Ed Butch: Yeah.

David Chadwick: And it actually pivoted with the pandemic. When Covid happened, we got introduced to more groups who were looking to enhance their communications. In one example, like with the NFL Players Association, they needed a way for their players to report Covid protocol violations. So if you follow the NFL, that was the year that if people weren’t wearing masks or if they were not in their hotels and sneaking out, right, like they had to cancel games and they wanted a way to be able to hold accountable better. So it fell in our lap a little bit when that happened. But quickly, we saw many use cases beyond college athletics where again, professional sports leagues were focused on reporting of misconduct and violations of their policies. Olympic national governing bodies initially were heavily focused on SafeSport reporting. If you’re not familiar with SafeSport, that was a government initiated act in the aftermath of some of the sexual abuse that had happened with the Olympic movement.

Other groups like professional sports clubs were focused in a corporate environment, right, employees having a way to speak up. Some of the integrity groups that we work with, like USADA. Integrity generally is like anti-doping and competition manipulation. So we just found all these different use cases again under the sports lens, the sports umbrella still. But I was always intrigued by how do we get beyond athletics on a campus? Because we for years had people ask us, “Hey, can you get beyond athletics? Can we do Greek life and can we do Title IX?” And all these areas. And we just always said no because the system was not designed that way. But once we had went through that exercise, during that two, three year period, post the pandemic of adapting our platform, making it a little bit more flexible to meet the needs of some of these new organizations, we now had a product through what became our texting in WhatsApp, anonymous messaging platform that we thought would make sense on a campus environment.

So I just began to have conversation with campus leaders, student affairs leaders, dean of students, compliance ethics folks, Title IX folks, et cetera, and showing them this and saying, “I know you already have hotlines. I know you already have web forms. I know you already have email addresses that people can use, but what do you think about texting? What do you think about WhatsApp? Just look around your campus at your student population. Everyone’s staring at their screen on their phone. This is how they like to communicate. Could this be leveraged in that way?” And we had a few schools say, “We think it’d be really interesting.” So again, this is emerging, it’s happened in the last 12 to 18 months, but it’s been really exciting to see the positive use cases there where people have told us, “Hey, in the past we haven’t had these types of issues get reported, and now we’re already seeing,” we had a school that went live last week. Day one, after they announced it they received almost 10 hazing reports.

Breaking down those barriers and making it easier so someone doesn’t have to do some of those more traditional or outdated ways of reporting has been really great. So to answer your question in kind of a roundabout way, yes, it was focused on sports initially, but the broader campus ecosystem is obviously not sports. And we’ve had a number of non-sports groups reach out to us more recently as well called the youth serving organizations, et cetera, that we think we’re going to continue to see further penetration into.

Ed Butch: That’s fantastic. You mentioned students looking at their phones and things like that as you’re on campus, but even faculty, staff, the adults quote, unquote in the room are oftentimes the same way. I think that it doesn’t just work well for students, but really across the entire campus community.

David Chadwick: Absolutely.

Ed Butch: And I think part of that, everyone being on phones and things really makes me think about mental health a lot. And we see mental health issues really growing on campuses. And I’m in Ohio and I found an article actually on your website about Ohio being the first state to require all high school coaches to undergo mental health training. And that really kind of struck me and I thought that was a fantastic thing. It wasn’t actually something I had even heard of, but how do you feel your system can really help in supporting mental health on campus?

David Chadwick: Sure. Yeah. I think it’s amazing what Ohio has done. I’d take a step back and just kind of ask the question of why are we here? And I know the answer we think can be Covid, so I don’t mean to suggest that, but the last four years since the onset of the pandemic saw a shift in not only our customer base but use of the platform where in years past maybe it was like, hey, this is just a place to report issues. Suddenly after the pandemic began, we’ve got people that are isolated, sometimes they’re quarantined, we’re not interacting with each other, we’re not being allowed to have some of those more traditional ways of gathering. People are oftentimes actually getting sick.

And we just saw this huge shift to, okay, we’re not just now focused on this one area, we’re focused on your entire spectrum of wellbeing, your emotional wellbeing, your physical wellbeing, maybe your spiritual wellbeing, and then certainly your mental wellbeing. And that was a really amazing expansion for us, and we applauded so many of those organizations doing that because they did see an uptick in use of the system. Right. Because now it’s not narrowly focused on one area, it’s focused on a number of areas, but we saw a lot of people come through and share those types of needs and concerns. As I mentioned in the beginning though, it’s not always just like a, hey, this is an issue you need to go address. Oftentimes it’s questions. It could be a question about where do I go to receive mental health help?

I don’t feel comfortable putting my name on it yet in terms of my submission and you knowing who I am. You look at the sports space and you have that huge lineman in football where maybe there’s that stigma, and I hate it and we’re trying to break it down, but I don’t need mental health help because I’m this tough person. Or in a number of other areas too, where maybe someone’s not raising a concern about themselves, but they’re raising a concern about a friend because they know oftentimes the more deep and inner working parts of their personal life where, “Hey, my friend recently broke up with their significant other, or they have a death in the family, or they’re really struggling in a class and what to major in, et cetera.”

We had one, and this was just a humbling one, example where a school called me personally, which was a little bit abnormal, but I think just to demonstrate the importance of this topic, they said, “David, we think we saved a life through RealResponse.” And I said, “Well, goodness, what happened?” And they said, “Through your platform, a student anonymously alerted us that a roommate had not come out of the room in the last 24 hours. They didn’t necessarily know how serious it was at the time, but we looked into it immediately, obviously and found out the person was on the brink of self-harm.”

So I tell people all the time, and I mentioned this on the previous recording too, it’s like a puzzle, right? There’s different pieces to the puzzle of what might be going on. You may only get the first piece of the puzzle initially, but that can help you see a potential bigger picture of what’s going on. And that question, just a simple question of concern by that student was the initial piece that allowed them to look into it. And if that person had been required to go fill out a formal reporting web form, right, probably less likely to do it because it’s going to take a lot of time.

Ed Butch: Right.

David Chadwick: I have to up the phone and call someone. I don’t even call my own parents, like I’m going to call you. Probably not likely. I got to walk into someone’s office and tell them. So we just again, we want to meet people where they are, especially as you’re talking about these more serious topics like mental health because hours matter, right, days matter, and you want to make it efficient and to be able to sync these people with resources as quickly as possible.

Ed Butch: Yeah, that’s for sure. Wow. That’s, fantastic sounds like an odd way to say it, but a fantastic story that that student was able to get the help in such a quick timeframe and everything and all.

David Chadwick: Demonstrates the importance of speaking up on behalf of your friends and seeking help for them as well, because again, in that example, that person was the extension of help that they needed.

Ed Butch: That’s for sure. For me, hearing this and hearing a lot about what you’re talking about in college athletics, and I think you mentioned hazing and things like that, as the administrator, former administrator in me thinks about, well, what does this collaboration really look like? So in terms of that collaboration from RealResponse with campus security, counseling, dean of students office, I guess, what does that look like in terms of handling these situations actually? That’s where my mind goes.

David Chadwick: No, it’s a great question. It’s something I’m passionate about. As I’ve learned more about the systems on campus and the different offices that I think a challenge that we see that we try to break past is just the barriers and the silos that can happen on campuses where, to your point, campus security, Title IX, dean of students, you have all these different offices who may be in themselves, had their own processes, own reporting portals, et cetera. It’s really important that the right people are in place and able to operate in a synergistic way when these types of things happen.

So the way that our system works, that we’ve seen a lot of success is traditionally there’s an initial intake team. So someone receives the submission. Again, it could be on a number of different areas. They are the super user for lack of a better term, and then you could have a whole host of other areas represented in the system as administrators who aren’t on the front lines, but are what we like to call those domain experts on standby. So if something came through that did warrant police being involved, or the Title IX coordinator or a counseling individual or whoever, that person could be added to the thread, immediately be looped into what’s going on, have the ability to create notes about the follow-up, and then most importantly, go back to the source.

That’s, in my opinion, our system’s greatest value. Anonymous is great if it helps break down barriers and people feel more comfortable coming forward. It is not great, even maybe further, like legally creates risk if you can’t follow up on it because now someone maybe gives you some information but not enough to actually act on and you’re stuck in the mud of having essentially even a record, right, of an issue that was shared with you versus in our system, you’re able to follow up with the person to do that exact thing, ask further questions, point them to resources, help them understand the follow-up, and to really facilitate the next steps of what needs to be done after that. We also have some ways that we’ve leveraged AI and workflows where automatically we hear that a lot from universities, is how do we make management easier here so it can go right to the right person that needs to have it.

So whether that’s the person categorizing their own submission or answering a few follow-up questions so they know, okay, this is a sexual misconduct, it needs to go to Title IX, or this is an emergency, needs to go to the police, et cetera, et cetera. The analogy I heard a school use once that I love that I encouraged others to try to replicate is that imagery of an orchestra, right? You’ve got a lot of different instruments, their own beautiful sound. You got a lot of different offices on campus, their own areas of expertise and the amazing things we’re doing. In isolation, they’re fine, but when you bring them together, that’s where the beautiful sound really happens. And when you’re handing off information and collaborating and follow up, what normally could be a really tedious and cumbersome and potentially risk creating process is one that can happen in a really seamless way, which we applaud.

Ed Butch: Yeah. So that’s really fantastic the way that that works. And I guess again, kind of a follow-up to that, is someone looking at these 24/7, like is that someone on campus or multiple people on campus that are looking at these? So if something comes in at 10PM on a weekend, which is probably early for a college student, but not necessarily through the faculty and staff. Right. And so I guess what does that look like kind of in the traditional off hours?

David Chadwick: Yeah. So you are asking, and with your background, not surprise, the number one question that we get. Right. Am I going to be inundated with text messages?

Ed Butch: Right.

David Chadwick: Great. We’re making it easier for people to report, but we’re also going to see an increase in volume and we’re going to get everything you can imagine. We haven’t seen that yet with the number of schools that have gone live. I mean, it’s been a very manageable way of, call it five to 10 a month or whatever that number is that they’ve been able to deal with these. Furthermore, and I’m going to get to your question just a second, but the ability to follow up has also cut out man-hours where maybe in the traditional sense I get a random email or a web form submission about a hazing situation going on within a fraternity. Well, what do I have to do? I got to go launch an investigation. I got to go interview potentially the leadership at that fraternity, maybe others involved. I got to do this full-blown process to try to figure out if there was something happening here and who was involved and et cetera, versus through our system, if you can respond back, then it’s really quick. Okay. Who was involved? When did this happen? Do you have any supporting documentation?

So you’re catching the person right then and there when you know they’re engaged and they’re already communicating. That’s really, really important. Now, the reality is people don’t want to be doing this at all hours, and I get that, and that’s important. And furthermore, there should be no expectation that if I submit this in the middle of the night that I’m going to get immediate response. So what we’ve done to circumvent that is number one, have a really robust auto reply. So that’s the text that they get back immediately after they submit something that could say something along the lines of, thank you for contacting X University’s anonymous text line. If this is an emergency, please contact 911 or our local police department at this number. We’ll see sentences like, please note that this is only being monitored during normal business hours, 8:30 to five. Someone from our team maybe used the word may rather than will, may respond back if needed. And then please note that while we can respond via RealResponse, your contact information is not shared with us.

So that’s just a few examples of sentences that we see in that auto reply that help really reinforce the expectation of how and why this should be used. And then we do have, again, some elements around decision trees and workflows, or maybe we can automate some of the intake initially when someone’s there versus that relying on someone, a human on the backend being there. But for the most part, I know this is what you’re getting to with your question, like we are yet to see a campus say to us, holy cow, this has opened up Pandora’s box. If anything, it’s the latter. Being able to respond back, being able to get to the source immediately, and then having that expectation of when and how this should be used through that auto reply has really helped address those concerns.

Ed Butch: That’s great. So there’s really that customization that each university is able to do in terms of what that messaging is and those decision trees and how that’s working.

David Chadwick: Absolutely.

Ed Butch: That’s great. Is there, and maybe this isn’t on the RealResponse side, and maybe this is universities, but I guess is there any monitoring or data run on the types of incidents reported within the system?

David Chadwick: We don’t see the information intentionally, so we are that conduit that brings it to the attention of our clients. Organizations do have a way to label their submission, so they could categorize it based upon what type of communication that it is, which then they get a dashboard that can help populate and summarize and aggregate those results. They can see, okay, how many fell into this bucket, Title IX versus hazing versus mental wellbeing, et cetera. Again, we are not necessarily privy to that, nor are we looking at it at a macro lover where I could share with you. I can just say more anecdotally, what we’re seeing on campuses are pretty consistent, hazing issues, mental wellbeing issues, just kind of general student conduct issues, and then we’ve also heard of academic integrity issues, Title IX concerns, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s interesting. I mean, if it’s not number one, hazing is pretty close to the top of one of the most consistent things that we’re hearing right now that schools are focusing on.

Ed Butch: Wow, okay. So I think it’s always great. I enjoy hearing them. I know the listeners enjoy hearing them, but we of course don’t want to break confidentiality, but can you share just maybe one or two scenarios where RealResponse has really been effective in enhancing safety on campus?

David Chadwick: Yeah, yeah. I gave the one earlier that I probably should say for this question around mental wellbeing. That’s one of several though. I mean, that one’s I think illustrated very well in terms of the outcome. But we’ve had other examples too, again, where people have said to us, “We found out about really serious mental health needs as a result of someone coming in and sharing a concern about a teammate or a classmate or whatever.”

Going back to hazing, we’ve had several schools launch in the last few months, many just as a way to kind of go into the spring semester, et cetera. And two of them told me that on the first day after they announced our system, they had anywhere from five to 10 hazing reports and pretty explicit serious ones, right, where people are being abused and there’s acts that are going on that are just pretty repulsive. And having the ability to be able to identify those number one and responded back to those are just so valuable. There’s other examples too where maybe I don’t have the data of the specific example to say, but how much bad behavior does this curb just as the result of these types of systems being in place? Right. So maybe now that I know this platform is here, I’m unlikely to do this hazing scenario because this could be reported to the administration very quickly.

I’ll speak to the college athletics lens. Again, they deal with a more unique example or issues rather. But in one specific one, we found out through a partner sharing with us that a coach was texting while driving to the point that these women felt very unsafe with kind of the swaying of the car and they were on a freeway. So really important for that to be shared with the right people to be able to act on in a timely way as well. General just kind of safety around injuries and some of those things being monitored as well. We’ve heard of examples where unsafe environments can occur, but oftentimes it’s kind of beyond the campus walls where you have students that are staying off campus, they’re in apartments, they don’t have, maybe the university police is close by, and especially in some of those urban areas, like it can just happen where you cross paths with people that are not safe and environments that are not safe, and folks kind of wander over to an area they shouldn’t be.

And we’ve heard and seen of our platform being utilized in those types of ways to quickly text in and take a picture of someone or make sure the appropriate people are aware of what’s happening. So that’s been, I think, a really timely one as well as you think about kind of this new world of education and higher ed and what does it look like where you have commuting students or maybe kind of the more virtual world or things that might be much different than they were years ago.

Ed Butch: Yeah, thank you for those. And I think it’s interesting you mentioned, and I think it’s obviously hard to measure in terms of what the system actually prevents from happening because the students and others know that the system is actually there. So I think to me, in my mind of course goes then to how the universities are rolling this out, the trainings that are happening. Right. I think about athletics having team meetings at the beginning of each season and coaches talking about this and the athletic director talking about this and letting them know that this is a system that’s in place. I think that that’s an important part of that implementation process too.

David Chadwick: Absolutely. Education is critical. One of our clients, Texas Tech did a really cool social media campaign where they put out an Instagram post of their dean of students’ office that even had the QR code on it that someone could take a picture and get linked right to the phone number. And the whole emphasis was, we value your voice, we want you to use it. We want you to speak up, we want to make reporting easier. So we can have the best technology in the world, and if no one knows about it, then you’re not going to have the success you want.

And those types of things like social media campaigns are important. Others create collateral, and I know at our digital age that’s a little bit odd, but magnets or buttons or cards that they hand out. One of our clients had a compliance and ethics week where the university put a focus on that topic and they had a table out in the common area, and they were just handing out these cards that had the phone number on it, the email, et cetera. So yes, you’re spot on. Education is really, really important if you’re going to see the success of what you want to have come out of the system.

Ed Butch: Great. Hey, sometimes old school tactics work the best, right?

David Chadwick: Yep.

Ed Butch: All right, so always want to be looking forward with some of this as well. Have you been thinking about some areas that you are hoping to expand into around campus or are currently expanding into?

David Chadwick: The expansion on campus is still ongoing, so I want to highlight that again because we are very rooted and well known in college athletics, but going beyond athletics to the broader campus population is one that’s a huge priority for us, especially with the success that we’ve seen thus far. So I put that at the top.

We’ve gone up from the college age student, right, so we’ve gone up to age in terms of corporate world, the corporate setting, employees there, et cetera. Now we’re actively talking, engaging with groups where we could go down from that age group in terms of the college student in really a number of different areas. We could certainly stay true to our sports expertise with youth sports, and that’s probably a whole nother podcast in terms of youth sports. It’s interesting. Youth sports is such an integral part of America culture, and honestly, I think it’s important just for instilling life skills and routines and hard work and all that.

Unfortunately, you do see bad actors and issues happen there, but when you have parents spending money and competition, there’s definitely a need for a similar type use case that we’ve had a lot of groups reach out to us about. But staying true to kind of this non sports talk that you asked about earlier, the youth serving organizations, YSOs are ones that we think there’s also a great opportunity. You look at all these youth serving organizations that have different ways that they bring youth together, oftentimes with adults, whether it be through camps or events or leagues, et cetera. We’ve had a lot of groups reach out to us as well about how could your system be leveraged in a similar way where unfortunately, and you hate to even talk about this, but those types of bad behaviors can happen, the power dynamic, maybe people coming together in unusual areas, camping, et cetera.

So that’s one that we’re really intrigued with right now because we’ve had several prominent groups reach out to us, a few have actually signed on that we’re going to announce here soon, and we think that’s an opportunity to scale our resource to literally millions of more people, which going back to your very first question about what’s RealResponse, that’s our goal, is to help more people in need and elevate voices. So if we can do that and to help stem out bad behavior in that space, which we’re already seeing great interest in, I think that’s a huge opportunity for us.

Ed Butch: That’s great. Running the gamut, looking at a lot of those youth serving organizations, youth sports, of course. I think those are all fantastic and kind of going through the age groups. And the nice thing for that for you is also thinking about it when all these universities are jumping on board with this, they’re going to potentially already know the system and understand how it works, which I’m sure is something that you’ll be appreciative of.

David Chadwick: That would be amazing. If I had a, I guess the full spectrum would be an employee at an organization one day who said, “Yeah, I used that in my youth sports organization, and then I used it as a part of an event that I went to or a camping event and my church used it or my synagogue, and then I went to college and I used it and I was on a sports team and I used it.” I mean, that would be the whole journey where at every touch point our platform was that safe and confidential way for them to speak up. That’d be a huge win for us, for sure.

Ed Butch: Before we get your final thoughts on some things, again, going back to the education component, that that’s important, getting the word out there. Beside the two-way anonymous communication, does RealResponse incorporate other resources or features aimed at safety education for the users?

David Chadwick: So across our products, and I know I mentioned at the beginning, just a really quick overview of them, we see a lot of people leveraging our survey system as a way to do more of a holistic evaluation around experiences. Certainly that might not be the education side, but that could be questions around specific parts of their safety. And something that’s been really great that we’ve been able to leverage now is having so many clients, we created question banks. So if someone wanted to do questions around safety or safety education, we could provide examples that other organizations had done before and to help them populate that as a part of their survey and then have benchmarks as well. So education’s one thing, but to be able to compare and understand how your safety is compared to others, that’s a really valuable data point to have too. So not education in the sense of watching videos or sitting in a meeting or something along those lines, but certainly on that side.

And then again, we see a lot of people ask questions. So maybe it’s just a quick one-off, “Hey, I wanted to know if this is illegal or not. Or I feel unsafe right now in this scenario, can you help me? Or what should I do?” That two-way communication can allow for that as well. But I’d say the survey component is probably the other one that we’re seeing.

Ed Butch: Okay. Great. Thank you. Well, this has been fantastic and great information. So I just wanted to kind of give you a minute for any final thoughts that you might have for our listeners.

David Chadwick: What I would encourage the listeners, and certainly those in a leadership role to consider is our society is changing at a rapid pace, and I’m a big believer that the pandemic accelerated this. And those that are operating in a traditional way of going about things, I believe are doing their organization a disservice. Because I think the ways that people communicate, I think the ways that people just interact, I think the ways that people thrive and develop relationships and all these key important things around someone’s physical, emotional, spiritual, mental health are changing rapidly. And obviously I say this with a little bit of bias, but I think it’s really important for us to get beyond the traditional ways of communicating. I joked when I said this, but this is true, right? The college age student is not even calling their parents very often. I hear that. They’re not going to walk into someone’s office and have a conversation with someone they don’t know or it’s very unlikely.

So how can we leverage, and again, we have great systems that we love, texting, WhatsApp, et cetera, but the AI expansion and the development, the rapid development that’s happening there. How can we as an industry and as leaders look to new technologies, new systems and new ways of going about things to meet people where they are and embrace the change that’s happening and ultimately stay true to what we want to do? Right. And that’s prioritize experiences, wellbeing, safety, and to be able to help those in need.

So I’m personally excited about it. I think there’s never been a better time to be able to leverage some of these emerging trends and technologies that are happening. I feel strongly that it’s also going to require the leadership of these, and I know we’re speaking to universities, but others as well, to embrace it and to get ahead of it and to put themselves in a position where they can be more proactive versus reactive to these types of things that are happening on campuses because they’re not going away. If anything, it’s going to continue on, and I think those that are thinking ahead are going to see the most success.

Ed Butch: I couldn’t agree more. Got to be forward-thinking for sure. That concludes our conversation for today, and I’d like to thank David once again for sharing his expertise with us.

David Chadwick: Thank you, Ed. My pleasure. I appreciate you all’s amazing podcast and the work that you’re doing to spotlight these important topics in the industry.

Ed Butch: Thanks so much. I invite all of our listeners to visit citiprogram.org to learn more about our courses and webinars on research, ethics, compliance, and higher education.