Crisis
Communications
101

Effective communication
during a crisis can make
the different between
quickly resolving the
situation and it becoming
a nightmare.

These 12 major principles
will help you take charge
of the next crisis.

1. Designate a single
point of contact for the
press, but have a
backup.

Set up both an email
address and a phone
number, both of which
should be manned just
about 24/7.

Be sure to have at least
one backup point of
contact.

2. The CEO/President
isn't usually the
right person to be
the spokesperson.

Reserve them for press
contact when a critical
message needs to be
conveyed, a more
authoritative presence is
needed, or there is
controversy.

The most serious of
situations still call for the
CEO to speak from the
start.

3. Appoint a crisis
leader with a backup.

Your crisis leader needs to
be versatile.

The crisis leader needs to
be appointed ahead of
time, not in the heat of
the crisis.

4. Have a crisis
communication plan.

Cover all the bases,
including media, social
media, employees and
stakeholders.

Jonathan Bernstein’s “Five
Tenets of Crisis
Communications”:
prompt, compassionate,
honest, informative and
interactive.

5. Practice your crisis
communication plan.

Go over each person’s
crisis role and work
through various crisis
simulations.

Using an online virtual
command center (incident
management software),
you can create pre-defined
scenarios that can be used
during practice runs.

6. Have tools in place
to monitor the news
media and social
media.

TweetDeck and HootSuite
are great tools—free and
paid versions.

Enterprise tools include
Radian6 and Sysomos.

7. Have a
central place
where
employees
can go for the
latest
information.

This could be
on your
intranet or a
hotline.

A confused and
possibly
frightened
workforce isn’t
capable of
putting in the
effort needed to
rise above crisis.

8. Be forthcoming. Don’t
lie or spin the truth.

If there is blame, admit it
and share what you will do
to fix the problem and
how you will make sure it
doesn’t happen again.

Follow through and
actually take the actions
you promised.

9. Have emergency
boilerplate
language for the
early moments of
the crisis.

Today’s public calls for
near-immediate reporting
on just about anything.

Prepare holding statements
for the media, such as: “We
are investing all available
resources in uncovering
what happened and will
share more information with
you as it becomes available.”

10. Have countermeasures ready if you
need to respond to
wide-spread rumors.

It’s very likely that
damaging rumors will
start on social media.

Start before a crisis ever
hits by getting involved in
social media and building
an audience.

Ask followers to help
spread the truth and refer
people to your
organization’s webpage.

11. Social media needs
its own crisis
communication plan.

You can’t apply the same
rules to social media crisis
communications as you
can traditional media
outlets and expect it to
work.

Don’t forget to include in
your crisis simulations
hurdles like enraged fans
or pages flooded with
comments.

12. Prepare for the
unexpected.

Craft specific plans for
foreseeable types of
crises, as well as generic
plans for broad categories
of unpredictable crises.

Good emergency
notification and incident
management software
allows you to create predefined templates for any
type of scenario.

When an event occurs,
select a template and your
teams have the people,
plans and tasks for that
type of event from the
start.

You can also use the
software to test your
plans under realworld conditions.

Situation Center
Notification Center
Streamlined,
easy-to-use incident
management software.
Smarter emergency
notification software
that’s built for missioncritical enterprise use.

Messaging center

Event log

Task management

Emergency notification

Documents library

Forms, and much more
EarShot
Beyond notification.
Rich, interactive mobile
messaging that includes forms,
photos and GPS location services.
www.missionmode.com

Crisis
Communications
101

Crisis
Communications
101