In a major response, your earliest communication efforts are critical in establishing your organization’s place at the communication table. Are you prepared to provide immediate, comprehensive and effective stakeholder communication? How do you know? Have you tested your capability?
You can test these response capabilities at any time, in the convenience of your own location and at a reasonable cost. Don’t wait for a scheduled exercise to test your capabilities. Avoid staff travel time and costs by conducting a Communicator Training Tabletop Exercise (TTX).
To develop and deliver a TTX, I take the following actions:
- Review your crisis communication plan
- Develop TTX objectives from the crisis communication plan
- Selected a scenario from one of your organization’s Facility Response Plans or Emergency Response Action Plans (Response plans have several different names)
- Develop scenario injects, using the selected Plan for real-life test of your team’s ability to meet communication objectives
- Train communicators to use the Plan
- Conduct the TTX to test participants’ capability to use the Plan
- Conduct TTX Hot-wash to capture participants’ learnings
- Evaluate participant performance against TTX objectives
- Provide an improvement plan for implementation by your team