How do you maintain your voice with changing stakeholders and changing response environments?
Incidents and their responses aren’t static; they grow and shrink, settle down and flare up. Each change threatens your ability to maintain a conversation with your stakeholders. An understanding of an incident’s life-cycle can help you understand how your communication process and products will have to shift to keep up with these changes.
First, let’s lay a foundation of facts to operate from:
Responsibility: If you caused an incident or if you are responding to an incident, you have more than a ‘right’ to communicate with affected stakeholders; you have a responsibility to. In no event can you justify a halt in communicating important information. You never get to take your ball and go home.
Effect: It’s not up to you to decide if people are affected, it’s up to them. People don’t have to be directly affected by an incident to feel it’s affect. Your roster of concerned/fearful/outraged stakeholders will grow. Any perceived ‘failure to communicate’ will escalate their angst, often more greatly than actual physical developments will.
All incidents start locally. Something happened that affected somebody, and no matter if the fuss and fury escalate to larger and larger populations, you will always have a most-affected group of people, usually defined by geography or by direct impact:
-
Geography: An incident occurs at a specific location, so the most affected stakeholders are the people closest to the affected facility.
-
Direct impact: A product is polluted or poisoned, and spreads to dispersed customers. While not necessarily geographically related, these stakeholders are related by impact.
These are your most-impacted stakeholders. They’ve borne the brunt of the incident. They are your ‘local’ by impact and interest. They must be the first people you talk to.
Incidents end locally. As the response winds down, the quantity of concerned stakeholders diminishes too. Some depart because they’re satisfied with the response. Some get bored. Some are dazzled by a newer, more spectacular developments. Media leave to chase other breaking news. Activist groups move on to the next funding opportunity. Politicians find another podium. Emergency vehicles and their flashing lights go back to dispatch. In all this, there remains a potent stakeholder group with enduring concerns, the same group that were there from the beginning; your ‘locals’, those most impacted and most interested. They will be the people you talk to the longest.
YOU are ‘local’ too! The incident occurred on your property, affected your facility, implicated or was spread from your product; one or more of these is true. You are as ‘locally’ impacted and involved as anyone else who suffered direct impact or exposure.
How do these rules and truisms fold into an incident life-cycle? Why is a changing strategy important? As a response moves through its ‘natural’ phases, a communication strategy must accommodate those changes.
Phase 1: Initial response
This could be an explosion, a leak, sudden illness from your product. It happens in a specific place, or to a specific population. Ideally, your organization is the first to know. Not always true, but let’s start here. You are the first to know what has happened and the first to respond.
What should you do?
Be the first to communicate. By plan, your first communication should be to those most directly affected. Facility Response Plans list local populations, product hazards spread through distribution channels. In both cases you likely have names and addresses of your first ‘victims’. Talk to them, immediately. Share all you can; incident updates, FAQs, Fact Sheets, maps and graphics, images. Establish an early conversation with your most affected stakeholders.
Don’t let someone else become the de-facto spokesperson for the event. Don’t let someone else become the ‘truth’.
Phase 2: Response escalation
Some incidents start small and stay small, with minimal escalation into a significant response phase. Most escalate. Additional response organizations arrive, regulatory agencies show up, local government bodies respond. This process can escalate clear up to state and federal agency responders arriving on scene.
Such escalation usually leads to some form of Unified Command, where multiple jurisdictions come together under a single unifying structure — hence ‘unified’ command. With Unified Command comes the Joint Information Center (JIC), the ‘voice of the response’. When a JIC is formed, all response communication is created by and channeled through it. As the ‘Responsible Party,’ your voice is subsumed into the JIC. You no longer speak for the response.
What should you do?
Be the first to cooperate. Join Unified Command and report to the JIC. Bring your initial stakeholders, initial updates and all the information you’ve already provided and join with the rest of the response communicators in the JIC.
Clearly express commitment and cooperation, so all response partners AND all affected stakeholders know you are continuing to communicate through the response megaphone of the JIC.
Activate your parallel communication plan. Identify all stakeholder issues and determine who will respond to each. As an example, the JIC won’t respond to inquiries about the impact on your stock price; it’s not a part of the response. Likewise, your organization won’t answer inquiries about which agencies are involved; that is part of the response.
Reinforce a key Unified Command rule in your Parallel Communication Plan: Participating organizations can speak for themselves, but they cannot speak for Unified Command. How does this fit in your plan? Feature organization-specific actions or announcements that will interest or engage some or all of your incident stakeholders. Dedicate a space on your website to JIC updates. Welcome comments or concerns while clearly specifying that you will route Unified Command-specific information to the JIC. Keep engaged in the conversation, both within the JIC and from outside the JIC.
Phase 3: Response deactivation
All good things must come to an end, including response activity. This is actually a really big deal and a major success. Whatever happened, the situation is under control enough so that everyone can go home, back to their lives and back to their day jobs.
Unified Command is deactivated, resources are ‘demobilized’ and sent back to where they came from. Functionally for the communicator, this means that the JIC will be disbanded. All the communication product should be copied and shared with all response partners, so you should receive some digital form of everything created and shared from the JIC. This should include contact information and concerns from stakeholders who contacted the JIC.
Here’s the shortest known definition of the Unified Command mission: Go home! Responses cost money, time and opportunity. Everyone in a response is missing out on their ‘day job’. Everything costs more. Everyone is losing days, weeks even months of their ‘real life’. It’s no surprise responses wrap up as quickly as possible; everyone involved wants them to.
Why is this important? Because the ‘start local, end local’ truisms rear their heads now. Just because Unified Command thinks the response is over doesn’t mean that the affected stakeholders agree. (See ‘I Want to go home’)
Affected stakeholders often expect more from Unified Command than they get, and this can significantly impact the long-term perception of response effectiveness. In turn this will impact the Responsible Party more than other response partners. This moment of celebrating the success of a response can carry the greatest reputation risk for the Responsible Party.
What should you do?
Keep on talking: Capture all the stakeholders from JIC activities and continue communication with them. Conduct a smooth, public handoff from Unified Command back to your organization. Translate the response’s communication curve to an ongoing process.
Expand on your Parallel Communication Plan to include this deactivation period. Maintain ongoing communication throughout the final phase of the response, which is…
Phase 4: Recovery
Recovery is the longest phase of any response. As we all know from childhood, it takes longer to pick up our toys than it does to take them out. While physical recovery plans may have specified milestones and ‘finish dates’, recovery communication continues to an amorphous end; when your stakeholders aren’t interested any more. Recovery communication often has a long ‘tail’, the length of time people remain interested. It can also exist as a sporadic phenomena, dormant for much of the time but jolted back to life by specific external events. Recovery communication has to account for all this ambiguity.
What should you do?
Expand your Plan: Expand (again) your Parallel Communication Plan to include Recovery communication. Plan on a longer-term, usually lower intensity engagement. Be sure to include significant dates and to target related events for communication attention. As an example, anniversary dates resurrect interest, as do investigation releases, lawsuit settlements, or related events. Be ready for your incident to be referred to in subsequent similar events.
Most significantly, remember that media hold long memories. Any stakeholder angst you have had to deal with (successfully or not) will be remembered, and those people will be asked for their opinion in the next similar event. And your ‘locals’ will again be important! Keep a communication curve for as long as you need to ensure that your most affected stakeholders are satisfied.
Hope
It may seem tiring, may even ‘make your head explode’ as one colleague has expressed it, but you’re far better served by planning as much as you can for all the phases of response.
- Any Unified Command response will require an extensive communication plan that incorporates strategies and tools for immediately effective communication, parallel communication through the response, then assumption of the mantle for response and recovery communication.
- And above all, you’ll need perseverance. All incidents that reach public awareness have a long ‘tail’ of communication needs. Be ready to keep talking.
Resource Material: I Want to go Home
Questions? Did you see ideas in this post that you’ve never heard of before? Contact me!
Comments? Leave them below.