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!

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.

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

What does a canary in a coal mine have to do with communications? It highlights a pernicious problem communication pros deal with: Communication and communicators often aren’t given the respect and position they deserve.

In December of 1986, a decades-old tradition ceased. Since the early 1900s, canaries had joined men in their descent into the earth to mine ore. The canary’s claim to it’s fleeting fame lay in its ability to inhale and use a greater quantity of oxygen than other easily transported animals. Canaries were small and light, easily transported in the tight confines of mines. Because of their heavy use of oxygen, they showed immediate effects to humanly undetectable changes in oxygen levels. They were effective air monitors. They were heavily used in British, Canadian and American mines until a more reliable, mechanical method of air monitoring could be implemented. Countless miners were protected by these living breathalyzers.

By combining portability, economy and prevalence, canaries were a ready solution to the real challenge of keeping miners safe. Mine owners were more than happy to invest in a few birds to keep the ore flowing. Mine workers appreciated the perky little critters, affectionately adopting them and whistling along with them. Early regulators appreciated their effectiveness in saving lives. Accountants appreciated their cost-effectiveness. Everyone was happy, and had they been capable of reason, canaries themselves would probably have appreciated the soft life of being an air monitor more than the dubious freedom of being prey to virtually every carnivore.

Despite their effectiveness, in the mining industries’ hierarchy of needs, canaries were likely near the bottom. That is why they’re in the title of this book. Canaries saved lives. They protected valuable personnel. They ensured production. They were more publicly acceptable than rats. They were in every way beneficial to the mining process, the mining industry and the mining profession. They just weren’t highly regarded. Nobody stayed awake at night trying to figure out how to save the canary. Nobody increased their budget to buy them better cages. They were used without much respect for the incredible benefit they brought.

Communicators are the canaries of response communication.

We tend to be lightly regarded, under-resourced and taken for granted. Yet in an actual response, communicators can save lives, protect personnel, ensure effectiveness of response actions, and protect both human and industrial capital. Why isn’t this recognized? We’ll talk about this more in the future, but here are some key reasons:

• We don’t measure well. Our profession seems to be ‘lightweight’, not given the respect of engineering, law, accounting, EMS and other response areas. Part of this is self-inflicted and we will talk about it later. Much if it is because nobody understands what we do.
• We don’t explain well. Other professions are well defined in the public eye. For better or worse, we all have an image of what people in other professions do: Lawyers, Engineers, Accountants, or Fire fighters – all carry clear imagery in the public eye – and in each other’s. Communicators don’t. The best we get is ‘flack’ or ‘hack’, maybe ‘spin doctor’. What is the short definition of a communicator that everyone can understand?
• We don’t display well. When we do the work we do, other people can’t see the results. Operators lay boom and everyone can see it. SCAT teams walk up and down the beaches and bring back pictures, measurements and plans. Finance hands people forms, stamps things and pays the bills. Communicators? Communicators… talk and type. Have you ever seen the Joint Information Center featured in a response documentary or report? Images of people typing and talking on phones aren’t compelling. We deal with this need for visual drama in setting up photo ops – where do you let media take pictures or make videos? Not in the JIC.
• We don’t quantify well. Planners record changes in quantities. Operators talk about things people see. Unified Command focuses on boats, boom, bodies and birds. Communicators talk about appearances, impressions, ‘opinion trends’, ‘sentiment analysis’, ‘hit counts’.

So if we’re not seen as important.  If people can’t readily comprehend what we do, our output can’t be seen and we can’t provide quantifiable evidence of our mystery work, why should we be surprised that we’re often not seen as crucial to a response? We easily become the dispensable, overlooked and under-appreciated eye candy that ‘real’ responders tolerate instead of respect.

Nothing could be less true.

Communication is actually the most important part of any public-touching activity.  Every day, every organization must be sure their stakeholders understand and appreciate what they do. Your product can’t be made if people don’t accept your facilities. Your product can’t be sold if people don’t understand its benefits. Your people can’t be proud if they don’t know what they’re making and your public can’t invest if they don’t see the potential return for their support.

In a response, people and equipment are the facilities; response objectives and success are the benefits; responders are the people and a cooperating public is the investor in the response efforts. The success of any response effort is defined by what affected stakeholders see and understand. In today’s world of drones and cellphone cameras, they will likely be able to see a lot without help from communicators, but they likely will not understand much without the help of effective communication.

Communication efforts will either provide a benefit or a cost to a response. Failure to effectively communicate will increase the response cost and reduce response benefits. Effective communication will decrease the response cost and increase the response benefits.

It’s time to replace the image of the canary with the vision of the modern communicator!

Interested in more information?  Contact me!

For almost 20 years, I’ve observed well intentioned and highly trained professional communicators consistently face challenges in providing effective crisis communication. I’m convinced that the issue isn’t our knowledge or training in the craft; it is understanding the dynamics we work under and how we can be more prepared by understanding the arena in which we strive.

At its core, crisis communication is the art and science of getting good at something we hope to never do. Communicators sincerely hope to be the ultimate understudy, never called to actually perform. We hope to be the last relief pitcher, really good at sitting but untested in pitching.

The role of stakeholder communication is institutionalized in Incident Command and Unified Command, powerful systems of ensuring effective response in bad-to-worse times, and we know it well. We just don’t often do it well, nor do we often do it at all.

First of all, a big shout out to the people who have faced the fire, who have stepped into a real crisis and performed under the rare pressure of peril. Regardless of how you feel you did, you were there and you’re still in the field, serving with a new understanding of what ‘the real thing’ does to you and your plans. If you want to know how to fight a fire, get advice from someone who smells like smoke. Communicators who have worked through a major crisis are rare, and have much to offer. My posts here are written in respect to each of you.

I’m breaking my future posts into three broad sections that coincide with the basic cycle of crisis communications; before, during and after. What are you doing before to be ready for a response? What do you need to know to be most effective during a response? How do you maximize your reputation after a response?

Each post is a cluster of observations, thoughts and recommendations that I hope help each of us be better at what we do. These are observations have worked their way through my mind to analyze what happened, why it happened and how it could have been done better. My purpose is to provoke thought that leads to better performance and better results.