Does your organization have a vision for effective crisis communication?
How would you rate your organization’s readiness for effective crisis communication? Like the old Wendy’s advertisement, do you see any beef, or is it all hot air? Let’s take some quick measurements:
- Do you have the staff resources you need to do communicate in a crisis?
- Do you have an adequate training budget to support readiness?
- Can you invest in new technology that helps you communicate better?
Your response to each of the above is likely; “Not as much as I want and not as much as I need”. Crisis communicators often face the reality that in their organization’s budget battles, response communication seems to rank slightly below fresh ground coffee.
Have you ever asked yourself why? Do you need a better cost-benefit analysis? Perhaps you need to use better measurements of effectiveness. Maybe you need to subscribe to better analytics – except of course you don’t have the budget.
Or maybe you have to ask yourself why crisis communication doesn’t seem to be very important to your organization.
Financial counselors know that the best way to determine a person’s spending priorities is to look at their checkbook, where dollars and cents represent desires and convictions. In your organization, if you don’t have funding for needed staff, tools or initiatives, the core issue is likely a lack of conviction regarding the importance of effective crisis communication and a lack of a vision to do better.
You’re trapped in this lack of vision for effective crisis communication. Your organization’s decision makers have weighed the risk of poor stakeholder communication in an incident against the cost of being prepared and you have come up short. They think that current funding is enough for effective stakeholder communication should something happen, but given that communication is actually the most critical element of any public-touching activity, they are actually betting on nothing happening.
This may seem a valid decision in corporate or organizational crisis planning, but it isn’t applied anywhere else. Consider the following day-to-day realities of life in a world where we recognize the value of preparation:
- Your organization is either insured or self-insured, and has reserves for multiple contingencies.
- It provides health insurance for employees, likely life insurance for executives.
- At a personal level, corporate decision-makers fasten their seat belts, lock their houses and frequently check on their children.
All of these actions reflect reasonable and responsible preparation in response to conscious or unconscious risk assessment. Each is evidence that decision makers know that things can and will go wrong. They just aren’t applying this reasonable and responsible thinking to crisis communication planning.
Virtually every organization in existence has a much more complex mix of variables, risk and exposure than any family unit. Greater complexity leads to greater risk, and greater consequences. An incident’s impact is multiplied by risk; consequences are multiplied by the impact.
As a communicator, you know that today’s increased ability to share information has dramatically elevated the reputation risk to your organization. ‘Citizen Journalism’ has given birth to faster but not better information, with the constant specter of fake news or real outrage. A ‘connected’ world instantly connects accidents to reputation, response to remuneration. A single misstep can decimate your leadership staff, stock price, reputation or all of the above.
How do you help decision makers value effective crisis communication?
How will you communicate this to your decision-makers? What have you been missing? You won’t have the budget you need until you’ve established the primacy and priority of effective crisis communication today.
Understand the risk: Work to generate a Corporate-level understanding of the criticality of prepared, equipped and mobilized communication staff and strategies to protect your Organization’s reputation and right to operate.
Identify the cost of poor communication: Help your corporate leadership understand that, in today’s real-time communication environment, bad communication strategy carries real costs and consequences:
- Project delays and legal challenges cost your organization, in market share, time and money.
- Cleanup costs from a demonstration can cost money and reputation.
- The extra time needed to respond to increased public attention and due diligence impact staff resources, delay other communication initiatives and impact reputation.
Point out the risk of wasted investment: Point out that poor crisis communication multiplies bad-will, and quickly neutralize or negate all the benefits of ongoing, usually considerably higher, marketing and public affairs budgeting. A common phrase from crisis-affected stakeholders is: ‘I will never buy your product again”.
Effective crisis communication planning minimizes these costs, saving your organization time, money and reputational goodwill. It’s worth the investment.
Interested in more information? Contact me!