Crisis Communication – Strategy, Messaging, and Training

Whether you need immediate help managing crisis communications or you want to get ahead of potential crises by having a crisis communication program created, we’re here to help.

Responding thoughtfully, strategically, and swiftly to crises can contain them and minimize damage to your company or brand. Ideally, it’s best to create a crisis communication plan before you need one. 

When assessing potential crises, we identify all the audiences you need to address and decide what information, assurances, and plans need to be shared with each.

Your audiences or stakeholders can include employees, shareholders, investors, customers, vendors, fans, and others. We tailor messages to each audience to address their respective questions, concerns, and needs and to position you and your brand as well as possible given the situation.

A single blanket statement probably won’t be enough.

When working with clients on reactive and proactive crisis communication strategies, message development, and training, we consider the emotional state of each audience. Effective crisis communication includes the facts that people need, a clear plan, and a tone that lets them know that you understand what they are going through.

In our crisis communication programs, we usually develop holding statements that can be used when crises first arise and address various situations and each audience. Simply having holding statements on hand has helped several of our clients to respond quickly to media inquiries when crises arose and bought time for us to work on the next phase of messaging that needed development.

It’s best to develop and test your crisis-response protocol before a crisis arises.

If you don’t have a crisis-response protocol in place we can help you develop one, possibly, in conjunction with your legal and medical/health advisory teams. It is vitally important that every person and piece of technology involved in crisis response is tested, ideally before there is an escalation of the situation. It’s also important to test for leaks by employees who should not be talking to the media as part of this process.

Training your spokespeople for crisis-related media interviews is vital.

Even if your company spokespeople (or you) are great in media interviews, practicing answering the tough questions involved in a crisis-related interview will ensure that they are as prepared as possible and minimize the risk of them freezing or misspeaking.

Your crisis communication planning should continue after the crisis is over.

There will be a recovery period during which many people will want assurances that it is safe to buy your product, use your service, or resume normal activities. 

The right crisis communication strategy, messaging, and training can help you avoid a multitude of problems and can position you for a better future.

To discuss your crisis communication needs, please call us at 310-479-0217 or email us at team@expertmediatraining.com.

If you prefer to find a time in Lisa Elia’s calendar, click the link below to book a consultation.