What Crisis Communicators do
When you’re in a social setting and someone asks you what you do for a living, how do you answer? How do they react to your answer? It’s ironic that communicators often have difficulty explaining what we do. Our words always seem to end up interpreted as ‘You’re a flack’, or ‘You’re a spin doctor’.
But that’s not what crisis communicators do.
Webster defines a communicator as ‘one who conveys knowledge of, or information about: makes known’. It’s pretty simple, really. We make knowledge or information known. That’s our role every day, and that’s our role in crises.
The core question is: Why do we do what we do? I suggest we do it because it is important to us. We have an urgent desire for people to know, to have information and to use it. With today’s fractured communication world devolving to smaller and smaller bursts of data, we believe people should have access to information and understanding. And we believe they should be able to use it for the mutual good.
This is what crisis communicators do.
Communication is more than sharing facts. Communication is the exchange of ideas as well as information, for the purpose of shared knowing. When we describe a sunset, we want people to feel the colors. When we share a story, we want people to laugh or weep. When we write, we want people to understand, to assimilate and share. We’re not just talking; we’re asking to be listened to. We’re not just putting information ‘out there’; we’re hoping it will be used well.
This is important to understand for crisis communication. We’re not trying to make people like us, we’re not trying to cover up mistakes, and we’re not trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. We want people to know and understand important information, and we want them to use it for mutual good.
- Response communication is first and foremost focused on safety. The safety of those affected, safety of responders, safety of the public. Before anything else, we want to provide information people need for their personal safety and for public safety. Our natural desire for understanding is supercharged by this need for safety.
- Response communication is focused on understanding. Will our stakeholders understand what is happening? Will they believe we’re doing all we can? Incident Command and Unified Command are both built on the principle of applying the greatest resources against a given problem for the greatest outcome. Our communication goal is that people understand this.
- Finally, communication is about reputation. Not our own reputation but the reputation of the response organization. Do people understand and respect the decisions, actions and results of response organization?
There is no effective crisis response without effective crisis communication. Only communicators understand this, and it often seems that only communicators care about it. At the core, we want people to know and use the information we provide. We want this both for our craft and for their consequences. Effective public communication places stakeholders in the greatest safety and responders in the best light. It is what we do. It drives us.
As communicators, we have the capability and desire to integrate response actions with stakeholder concerns in a way that brings understanding and acceptance to the complex functions of response. Done well, we all benefit. Done poorly and all our lives are harder.