By Linda Abbott, L.M.H.C., Consultant, TNG Consulting, LLC
In this series, we continue to explore the updated NABITA Industry Standards for Behavioral Intervention Teams. These standards offer proactive guidance to BITs in developing effective approaches for preventing harm and enhancing safety. Standard 9 emphasizes the importance of educating the community about recognizing behaviors and making referrals to the BIT. By doing so, it helps to improve overall safety.
Standard 9. Community Education and Marketing: The team educates its community about bystander engagement, recognizing leakage, and making referrals. The team markets its function/services through advertising campaigns, websites, logos, and other promotional materials.
The BIT or CARE team has an important role in educating the community and encouraging referrals. NABITA recommends a holistic approach to education and marketing, which includes training the entire community, including faculty, staff, and students, on how to identify and refer concerning behaviors. Training the community to recognize academic, emotional, behavioral, and physical indicators that may seem minor and encouraging individuals to submit referrals for those concerns is critical. Educating the community to recognize all levels of risks helps create a culture that encourages referrals, making the community engaged, proactive, and safer. Creating a culture of referring not only threats but also lower-level concerns has a broad diffusion of benefits that reaches beyond preventing mass shootings and other types of violence. Responding to lower-level concerns that would likely never escalate to violence creates a community of care and support that helps individuals and reinforces an institution’s academic mission by increasing opportunities for persistence and retention. Educating the community to recognize all levels of risks helps create a culture that encourages referrals, making the community engaged, proactive, and safer. This increased reporting also positions your team to address issues before they potentially escalate into threats.
Informing your community about the concept of “leakage” is crucial. Leakage refers to communication to a third party by an individual that indicates planned attacks on other individuals, groups, or systems.1 Studies have shown that a significant number of targeted violence incidents involve leakage, whether intentional or unintentional.2 It’s important to remember that violence doesn’t occur spontaneously. There are always warning signs. At NABITA, we recommend training your community members to report any concerning behavior or activity (leakage) on social media, emails, text messages, phone calls, websites, and other platforms. This will help you catch potential threats early and intervene appropriately.
BITs should have a marketing plan that reaches all the community members through active and ongoing efforts such as presentations, orientation programs, tabling events, and passive efforts, including websites, posters, and brochures. BITs should promote themselves as a resource capable of addressing behaviors across the entire risk spectrum, connecting individuals with the necessary support at an early stage. Educating your community bolsters a growing recognition of the BIT’s scope and builds trust and understanding of the team’s function.
A BIT’s marketing plan should be tailored to its specific needs. Using data from the electronic recordkeeping system can be beneficial in identifying those needs and guiding the marketing plan. For instance, if the data indicates that a particular department is referring fewer individuals compared to the broader community, the marketing plan can focus on reaching out to that specific audience and better training them on how to identify and refer individuals. Similarly, if higher-level concerns are the only ones being reported, the marketing plan can emphasize the importance of identifying and referring lower-level behavioral indicators. An effective marketing plan will always take into account the target audience and the best ways to reach them.
Practical tip: Community education and marketing is an ongoing endeavor, not a task shelved until the start of the next academic year. Develop a strategic marketing plan in consideration of distinct target audiences, diverse methodologies tailored to engage these groups, and a detailed understanding of their educational needs. Use data from the electronic recordkeeping system, in conjunction with insights gleaned from end-of-semester and end-of-year reports, as a tool to make the best use of the marketing budget and resources.
Stay tuned for the remaining Tips of the Week in the BIT Standards refresh series. In the meantime, review NABITA’s “BIT Roadshow,” a campus training template that teams can use to teach their community about their work and how to identify and refer students who need help.