Take actions to ensure that you are really ready to communicate effectively.
It’s time to take actions to ensure that you are really ready to communicate effectively. The recommendations I offer below, for greater and more focused preparation, are formed by actual experience. Each will be expanded on in future posts, but these are actions that you can take right now.
Of course you can do this later. Nothing is going to happen right now, right? Consider the definition of an accident: “An unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.” When is ‘unexpectedly’? When is ‘unintentionally’? Maybe ‘now’ should mean ‘now.
The hard truth is that when we think we’re really ready, we’re not.
This is the time to realize that crisis preparedness is more than thinking about performing risk assessment and stakeholder mapping, planning to prepare statement templates, approval processes or distribution lists, or reviewing policies. It’s time to take action.
Mark Twain has frequently been credited for Charles Dudley Warner’s phrase: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
There is a big difference between thinking and doing. Instead of worrying about unpreparedness, you need to become prepared. If you don’t take concrete steps to enhance your preparedness, all you really know is that you be neither ready to communicate in a crisis, nor allowed to communicate effectively.
What do you need to do to be really ready?
Polish your policies
Make sure your organization’s policies support rapid communication:
- Protect your position of being the source of initial information for stakeholders who are important to your organization.
- Incorporate permission to utilize the information from initial regulatory reporting as key facts for your initial statement.
- Ensure you can use reporting organizations as key non-media contacts for your initial statement.
- Formalize the process of utilizing HR to disseminate updates to employees within your organization.
- Codify use of Government Relations contacts or processes for distribution to elected officials.
- Institutionalize use of a short top media list.
Socialize your policies
Communicate all policy changes and planned actions with all key decision makers. Remind them of the primacy of stakeholder communications to preserve your organization’s reputation – and likely their personal reputations.. Share your commitment to regular review and testing. Build a schedule of tests based on your risk assessment, starting with the most critical risks.
Practice against your policies – the mini-drill
You don’t need to wait for a formal response exercise to test your communication preparedness. Instead, conduct mini-drills on a regular basis. For each mini-drill:
- Select a likely scenario from your risk assessment.
- Use your statement templates to create an initial release.
- Send it to a list of internal contacts, would-be approvers, HR, Legal and/or Government Relations. Any person who would hold approval rights in an actual response.
- Add language indicating that this DRAFT statement would be immediately distributed in an actual event.
- Follow up to actually get ‘approval’ from each person, so they become aware of the actual approval workflow.
- Prepare a stakeholder map for the selected scenario, including key concerns and questions.
- Formulate three key messages to address the identified concerns and three inquiry responses for the identified questions.
- Identify information needed for your second release.
After your mini-drill, evaluate what happened
- Was the template adequate for use in your selected scenario, or does it need editing? If so, edit it now.
- Did you receive a quick response from your approvers? Did they recognize the urgency and response appropriately? Did you have to make edits to your release? Do you have to work on the approval process? If so, do it now.
- Were you able to quickly create a stakeholder map and write key messages and inquiry answers? If so, save the inquiry answers for later use.
Congratulations, you just increased your capability to be really ready to communicate in an actual response!
Today’s ‘Citizen Journalist’ and ‘Instant News’ communication environment is a ‘weather maker’ that can easily turn a squall into a tempest, a tempest into a cyclone. There is no time margin when communicating an incident response. Your organization will go from back burner to front pages in minutes. Its time to do something about the weather instead of merely complaining about it.
Polish your policies, socialize them and practice against them! If you don’t do this now when you have the luxury of time and training, when it is time to communicate in an actual response, you can’t and you won’t.