Donna Itzoe, Senior Vice President of Communications and Marketing at Global Medical Response.
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None of us wakes up in the middle of the night wanting to deal with a crisis. We also certainly don't wake up hoping for a crisis: quite the contrary. As communicators, the reality is that we are integral to solving crises our organizations face.
Whether they're man-made, natural or reputational, communicators are integral to any crisis situation in your company or the organizations you support. Many communicators spend a great deal of time planning and preparing for various scenarios.
For this article, I'm focused on searching for the next crisis by focusing on two key ways we can prepare. By organizing our teams and monitoring to look for crises in the making, we can prepare and ensure our response plans are that much more effective for the organizations we support. Ultimately, this helps mitigate the effects crises have on our own often-small and stretched communications teams.
It may seem contradictory to focus more on the monitoring (searching) than on response plans and scenario strategies. Both are important and necessary. However, situations can start to be less chaotic when we flip the emphasis from responding and focus instead on actively seeking out a crisis in the making. We can do this by building a strong communications culture of real-time, all-the-time crisis monitoring.
Organizing For A Crisis In The Making
There are some realistic organizational strategies for dealing with a crisis. The most successful one I've found to work best is spreading crisis management responsibilities throughout the communications team instead of having it reside within just one group. When I first pulled together the organizational structure for my own marketing and communications team, I took a traditional path. I originally had them separated by function with crisis communications operating as its own team—and actually, today they are organizationally separated by function, but the lines are extremely blurred.
It only takes one or two situations on a small team to feel the stress and realize crises don't belong to one group within the communications function. They belong to all of us who are managing our brands and reputation. By adding existing team members to the monitoring and response responsibilities, you're expanding the potential to find the brewing crises as well as have more hands to focus on the response. And there's a simple reason to organize this way. None of the other marcomms functions are fully effective while there is a crisis underway on your team. So much rides on what's unfolding.
A good byproduct of that for us was that I organically expanded what people were searching for. For instance, the marketing or internal communications team members looked for different situations than the traditional PR teams. This was a big benefit. We also expanded the team members who could help respond. Since most team members have fundamental communication skills—writing, editing, social and planning—it wasn't a huge stretch to ask an internal communications expert, for instance, to help draft a message that could be shared externally as well.
Monitoring
For monitoring, every member of your team (including external consultants) can and should monitor where they can. There are several tools that can help you, and they vary in cost. You can also hire external firms to monitor. The key is to find a solution that works well with your own team's capabilities and budget.
Some features to look for in monitoring include:
• The ability to geofence for organizations that are geographically dispersed. That way, you can zero in on information related to a specific area.
• Real-time notifications and alerts, whether the solution sends them by text or email. And, importantly, they should go to more than one individual on your team. Likewise, every member of your team should have the authority and ability to notify as many people as you've defined in your crisis plan—you may not have the time to be the only gatekeeper.
• Standard, ongoing monitoring terms: You know your organization and what you would look for, so make sure you can populate a search tool or give your teams those same terms, activities and so on.
• The ability to create limited-time searches for those events or activities that occur within a certain time span. This is probably less relevant for reputational issues and more important for single events.
The Calm In The Chaos
Once you are faced with a crisis, we know that communicators must calmly emerge through the chaos to bring your organization back to center. Perhaps at no other time was it more clear that the role of communicators is vital than during the Covid-19 pandemic. During that time, organizations and clients looked to communicators to share the key issues, what to do and how to reach each other. And certainly, the ever-changing and unfolding nature of the situation meant communication teams were omnipresent in meetings to help guide planning.
One way we are able to remain semi-calm is by relying on a robust communications crisis plan with multiple scenarios, holding statements or starting points, and a notification plan. Since these are planned in advance, you don't have to wait to determine how or who to engage or what the first step is. One important note about holding statements: They are just a holding or starting point. Before you use any of them with internal or external audiences, vet them just before use. During crises, events tend to move quickly, and your original statement could become outdated—thus causing you an additional crisis.
This is really no different than what communicators do every day. We problem-solve by understanding complex issues—quickly, adeptly and with experience and expertise. Crises amplify and speed up all of those. But through solid planning, searching and monitoring, we've got this.
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