Episode 5: Ask Lou with Lou Drapeau

Lou Drapeau, the wizard behind the Ask Lou button on the URMIA website, is live and in person with host Jenny Whittington. Now, hear his voice (!) as he discusses the resources in the URMIA library, his involvement with URMIA’s discussion communities, and more! As URMIA’s resource manager, Lou makes it a mission to help you connect with peers and all of URMA’s member resources that will help you meet the challenges you face as a risk manager in higher education. 

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Transcript

Jenny: Welcome everyone, welcome to URMIA matters, our new podcast. So, today with me is a special guest, Lou Drapeau. He is the infamous ask Lou button on the URMIA member website. So, Lou, welcome and why don’t you just tell us a little bit about how you got involved with higher education risk management and what led you to working at URMIA part-time.

Lou: Sure. I had quite a bit of experience in Risk Management, both as a municipal risk manager and as risk manager in private industry as supplier to the automobile industry and then I wound up working for the University of Kentucky and risk management and was a member of URMIA at that time and then after I retired from the University of Kentucky, the job as resource manager i.e. ask Lou came open and I applied for it and was hired and here I am.

Jenny: Yeah so now so prior to the ask Lou button, we did have an Ask Glenn button which was his predecessor, but Lou is a very famous figure in the URMIA community, he does wear an ask Lou button at the conference and I know he made many friends that way. So today we're going to be talking about some of the resources and the hot topics that come up on the URMIA network, which is our online community So Lou, why don’t you start by telling me what one of the topics that has been coming up over and over again on the on the online community.

Lou: Ok, well one of the recent ones that we’ve had is scooters, these electric scooters on campus are and there's been a lot of questions about those.

Jenny: Yeah, I know they’re all over Bloomington, Indiana now, where the URMIA National Office is. And my son who is a freshman at Indiana University uses them all the time. So, where do you steer members when they ask questions about that.

Lou: Well usually to discussion topics on our web site, where other people have asked that question and then gotten some responses, and it's interesting the broad range of responses in that area there are some campuses that don't allow them, there are other campuses that are using them fairly extensively, so it's really kind of a broad range of responses on risks involved.

Jenny: I think that's what makes URMIA and what makes risk management so fundamentally interesting, is that the way the risk appetite among institutions in among the risk managers is so unique. It’s unique to the person in the risk manager roles, it’s unique to the institution, so I think I personally have heard of some e-scooter stories that I think it's a real risk and I will share that at our regional conferences this year we did some round table discussions in Richmond, and  Keisha Trim from University of Richmond led a discussion on e-scooters because she was trying to decide would their institutions allow them. I'm not sure where that played out with her, but it is certainly a hot topic. So, what's next on your list? 

Lou: Well,  one of the things that people ask about is events on campus and event insurance and how do they handle events, what are the requirements, what kind of events do you allow on campus and things like that and once again I've been referring people to the discussion groups of how other people are handling events.

Jenny: Are there any specific… I know I feel like in the library there's an event folder, are there certain resources that you direct them to in the library?

Lou: There is an event folder that has different types of events in it and the kinds of things that were there on campus or off-campus and whether there is alcohol involved or athletics or other dangerous kinds of things, so I refer them to those resources.

Jenny: And this seems like an appropriate time to talk a little bit about URMIAs tulip insurance policy. So, URMIA does offer two Insurance products to our members; they can purchase insurance through URMIA. So, are tulip policy does protect events on our member campuses so if anybody is interested in learning more about that it's under Insurance on our website or please reach out to me or Lou for any questions about that. Okay, what's next up on your list? 

Lou: Another biggie is international travel, and as you can imagine, there are so many different aspects to international travel, depending on where you're going and what the safety requirements are and if the state department has it on a watch list or whatever it may be so. They're just all kinds of aspects of that and we've got a lot of resources on international travel.

Jenny: Yeah, since I've been with URMIA since 2005, international travel is a constant. I think it's always going to be there at the constant higher education risk from faculty traveling, students, keeping them safe while they're abroad and certainly the world changes all the time, the activities in Hong Kong are certainly top of mind I think with our members right now. Also URMIA has an international committee we’ve had probably the last 10 years and they actually are developing an insurance kind of requirements document, so everybody should look for that in the future that it'll come out from URMIA’s international committee. Ok, what's next on the list?

Lou: Another one that we get a lot of questions about is club sports of sports and how you handle club sports on your campus and of course this is different from the athletic teams that are sponsored by the university. These club sports sometimes get into different activities that may not even be allowed on some campuses, so that provides some interesting questions

Jenny: Do we have some resources in the library for that as well?

Lou: We do. A lot of different universities have policies and procedures on how they handle club sports, they need to have insurance or not depending on what it is, if they a lot of them that have to have a first-aid person on hand if it's something that you know, soccer, flag football or something somebody could get injured and need to have a medical person. They are so, of course that sometimes creates a problem for the club sports teams to be able to get somebody to be at their events 

Jenny: So, when you were at University of Kentucky, did you have club sports there?

Lou: We did.

Jenny: Did you have a bunch?

Lou: Yep. 

Jenny: I know certainly here at Indiana University; we have a ton of them as well. Did you have any lessons learned there that you can share? 

Lou: Well, one of the things we did require having a first-aid person on hand at the club sport events just to make if sure something happened that we had a hospital right on campus so we could get that person very easily to emergency personnel to take someone to the hospital if they needed too, but we were pretty strict about that.

Jenny: Sure, that makes good sense. What’s after club sports?

Lou: Another recent one that I think is coming up because of some of the drops in attendance at universities is residence halls and having underage students in residence halls because there are a lot of 15, 16, 17 year olds that have already completed high school attending college and yet they're not technically old enough and the same thing, another one is come up recently is that some of the universities are having problems filling their dorms and are looking at the possibility of having non students live in those dorms, which seems real risky to me, but it's an issue that has come up.

Jenny: yeah I mean in these days we really watch budgets and higher education has to protect the assets so I think finding new revenue is something that everybody's going to have to get used to in that does come with risk and minors on campus doing camps of things with a whole other topic, but and the young students that are getting admitted early to get to campus,  did you deal with that at all when you were at the University of Kentucky? Did they have a separate dorm or had how was that worked?

Lou: Well no actually they used a lot of the different dorms during the summer camps and things because they had a huge, huge program all kinds of different camps for minors they had golf camp, basketball and softball in the whole nine yard. So they would use a bunch of different dormitories, but again they had to have rules and regulations and always a bit of a problem.

Jenny: Ok, and you have one more? 

Lou: Yeah, one that has come up real recently is some, there was a university that was looking at a startup up cannabis CBD manufacturing program and I thought that was a really interesting one and I didn't have any answers for that one.

Jenny: As the legalization of Marijuana, I think it's certainly have a lot of unintended consequences and I know that topics come up over the last couple years many a time, you know it as more and more states legalize it what can we learn from the early adopters, and I think we're still going to learn a lot from, but that's really where the URMIA community, the URMIA network can really come to your rescue because there are risk managers who have dealt with that on their campuses so I think that's a good plug to use the community. So, while I have you Lou why don't we talk about just some of the other resources I know you're specifically from the strategic plan working on the resource guide task force, can you tell us just a little bit about the resource guide as a resource for our members?

Lou: Sure. The resource guide is a separate tab on our website and it gives you a whole bunch of different resources in different areas if you want to learn about ERM, it refers you to some of the year and resources in our library. There other different areas, claims and all kinds of things that Risk Managers get involved in and resource documents either in our library or in several cases we’ll refer you to resources on other websites basically to help risk management personnel do their job and find the kind of resources that they need in order to do that job. 

Jenny: Yeah I can't remember exactly when we launched the resource guide but we really found the board at the time found a need to develop a resource for people that were new to higher education risk management or maybe new to risk management in general so I believe the resource guide really targeted at kind of entry-level kind of to give you a lay of the land. It's a resource that we're currently evaluating and looking to update but the information in there is still good and I want the members to know that we are updating it.

Lou: Alright and some of it, it’s really no longer completely for people new to risk management. There are some more advanced resources in there now.

Jenny: That's great. And in this next revision, we’ll kind of differentiate beginner series versus intermediate or what have you. How about the risk inventory, will you tell everybody a little bit about that?

Lou: Well our risk inventory is a real, a very helpful tool for risk management, risk managers to identify the risks that they have on their campuses and obviously different campuses have different kinds of risks, and the interesting thing that we found out in the process of looking at and updating the risk inventory was that a lot of our membership was not aware of it and we'd so we did a little survey and found out the people who that once they found out about it we're saying it was really a great resource and they were surprised that they hadn't heard about it before, so I think we need to promote it a little bit more because it is a great resource and we are in the process of updating it and fixing to make it even more useful to our membership.

Jenny: Terrific. And for everybody out there, it’s not a complicated tool that you have to have a special software, it's basically in an Excel sheet that you can slice and dice and output however you want so it's a really friendly tool that you can use and I know as I presented for URMIA sister Association conferences I’ve a definitely shared it with NACUBO overtime and it can be a very useful tool. I'd encourage all of our members check it out and last but not least why don’t we talk a little bit about the core competency document.

Lou: Ok, yeah that core competency document is kind of an outline of the core competencies that are needed by Risk Managers and it's really a very useful tool for Risk Managers to be cut at all levels to become familiar with.

Jenny: And I know one of my favorite things about the core competency book are the checklists   so you can kind of say oh yeah I have this skill, I have that skill but to get to the next level I need to think start thinking about these other skills to kind of add to my tool kit. So, I would encourage everybody, URMIA members, check it out it's a great tool, it's a great way to round out your own skill set, to get to the next level or if you're working on a job description, it's a great way to look at skills that are needed that you might not have ever considered but it's a great document. Any other resources that you want to highlight while we're …

Lou: Well certainly we might need to mention the URMIA Library there are all kinds of resources in there and they're all searchable documents and we're in the process of working on updating tags and looking at all of the various documents to make sure they're still relevant and we may wind up archiving some documents and putting some additional documents in there a little more modern and relevant to the risk management process. 

Jenny: So, if members have resources that they would like to share, what’s the best way to get them to you?

Lou: Well. If they can sent them to me by email or however they would like we’ll take any resources that would be useful to the membership and make sure they get in the library 

Jenny: And your email is resources@urmia.org.  

Lou: That’s correct. 

Jenny: Ok excellent,  I just wanted to tell all the members take advantage of the recordings that we do from the conference so I'm not sure everybody's aware of that as a resource either but we do record all of our breakout sessions at the annual conference and all of those are part of the library and if you enjoy podcast technology you can also listen to those recordings while you're having lunch or on a drive, so I encouraged everybody to check that out. Any other resources you want to talk about? 

Lou: I think those are the major ones. We’ve talked about most of them, I think. 

Jenny: Awesome and if anyone has a resource please reach out to Lou and share that with him or if you have any ideas for areas in the library that we need to increase or folders we need to add or any suggestions, please reach out to Lou or Jenny Whittington and we’ll love to take your feedback. So thank you, Lou for being my guest today. That's going to be a wrap of URMIA matters for this time and URMIA matters podcast is brought to you by the University Risk Management and Insurance Association and while you're there if you'd give us a five star review www.urmia.org that's www.urmia.org to check out our wealth online resources thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.