Activate Your Free Crisis Subsite For Consolidated Coronavirus Communications

As your partner in education we have a responsibility to give you the best resources for communicating with your community about updates regarding the Coronavirus. To help you create one location to share information, we are offering you a crisis subsite at no charge until the outbreak is resolved.

We recommend you populate this subsite with important information on Coronavirus, including school schedule changes, best practices for cleanliness, and state and local guidelines. This will allow you to keep your community informed while managing all the content in one location. To help you get started, here's an example of what a crisis site might look like.

Crisis template download steps

  1. Navigate to Configure in Site Manager
  2. Select Templates
  3. Under available templates select Standard 
  4. Select Download & Preview next to Crisis Management
  5. Select I’m done when the popup of the template shows
  6. Select More and select License
  7. Select the Inactive button to the left of the template name

Subsite activation steps

  1. Navigate to Sites in Site Manager
  2. Add the Crisis template to New Subsite
  3. Select the Inactive button to the left of the site name

We expect you'll see increased traffic on these pages and recommend these best practices when building out your content:

  • Avoid using record-based apps like the Headlines & Features or Blog apps. These apps open the content in separate, non-cached pages, which may slow page performance.
  • Keep your content simple. Limit images, rotating galleries, videos, and embedded documents and stick with just text. When your site is likely to receive unusually heavy traffic, it’s better to use available resources to serve relatively simple content to very large numbers of visitors.
  • Create a friendly URL (e.g. /coronavirus), but always directly hyperlink to your subsite when directing people there from other channels.
  • If your template is resource-intensive (e.g. it makes use of Mega Menus in the Channel Bar, Media Rotator, etc.), performance may be impacted. You might consider discussing alternatives with your account team and/or Creative Services.

Blackboard is dedicated to working with you and your district to ensure you’re able to get critical information out to your students, their families, and the community in a timely manner. If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team at [email protected] for assistance.