Five Steps For Developing a Crisis Communications Plan

Business leaders: If a national crisis unfolds, do you know what to say to your team, key stakeholders, and customers?

Marketing, PR, and communications professionals are the C Suite's best traveling partners for the road ahead, and now is the time to collaborate with them on a plan for handling all the What Ifs.

To help executives start this conversation with their MarComm team, we've assembled an at-a-glance action plan that outlines five key steps for developing a crisis communications framework. Keep our list close as you develop your own playbook.

1 - REFOCUS ON CORE VALUES

Before a crisis occurs, shore up internal comms by regularly touching on core values and how they shape the value of your products or services. If they don't already exist, create mechanisms for dialogue between the C suite and the rest of your organization. Comms teams have the power to build coalitions and consensus, so tap them to help you hold team events focused on empowering staff to become ambassadors who keenly understand vision, mission and brand DNA. 

2 - GET BACK TO BRAND DNA

Guided by your values and using your vision, mission and brand guides, collaborate with comms to build a mechanism for assessing how, when and why your company could or would speak out in the event of a high-profile tragedy, emergency situation, or national crisis.

3 - MAP OUT YOUR MESSAGING PLAN

With that process in mind, tap your comms team to develop a communications matrix that clearly articulates a wide variety of messages for good times and bad. This plan should run through every scenario, from the more than likely to the remotely possible.

4 - DEVELOP A CHANNEL STRATEGY Work with marketing and communications to determine which channels will be used in case of an emergency – phone, email, print, SMS, social media, satellite phones, radios – and designate a core team to take the lead on message distribution. (Don't leave this up to just one person.) This strategy should consider the target audiences' access to each channel, while also identifying communications devices needed during an emergency where teams may be isolated or spread across a wide geography. Additionally, this strategy should plan for the potential failure of channel comms in the event of a grid collapse.

5 - TEST IT OUT

Dust off (or build!) your crisis playbook. Inform your board. Walk through the plan with key players and set up a mock scenario or two. Run drills to pressure test your process. Give each crisis team member a binder to reference and open a secure messaging group for them use on the go. Don't ignore this important exercise.