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By your anecdote. A crisis response plan requires that someone (a) know that there is a crisis; (b) be capable of identifying the nature of the crisis; and (c) be sufficiently well-informed to give people a prudent plan of action for protecting themselves. If you don't know what people should do to protect themselves you could easily make the situation worse by simply instilling fear and panic or even, heaven forbid, putting them in a more dangerous position. By all reports, VT didn't know it had a crisis, and it's not clear what officials would have told students to do to remain safe even if they were worried that a crisis could arise -- that is, who students should be looking out for, and how to avoid him, when they didn't even have that information themselves. Since the shooter was among those who would have been unwittingly notified the authorities would have been giving him a road map on how to act.
