Crisis communications

Are you ready to face a crisis?
Our crisis communication preparedness assessments examine your crisis communication capability by geography, business unit, or across the entire organisation. We assesses the ‘hard’ elements of crisis communication preparedness (policy, structure, procedures) as well as the ‘soft’ elements (leadership, competence and culture) against our own crisis communication principles, which we have developed from decades of experience supporting clients in real crises. This identifies areas of existing resilience and weakness, and is often used by communications teams at the start of a crisis preparedness improvement programme or as a post-crisis review. It can also act as a benchmark can be used in subsequent years to track and quantify enhancements in crisis communication preparedness.

What is your social media strategy?
Social media has moved beyond being a marketing tool: it is a basic communication channel for engaging with customers and stakeholders.

Our crisis communication consultants work with you to strengthen you capability to use social media effectively during a crisis. This could include:

• Social media crisis assessments to review plans and processes, and identify gaps.
• Social media crisis response planning to develop and build internal capability, plans and processes.
• Social media crisis training and workshops to enhance understanding of the role of social media in a crisis.
• Social media crisis exercises to rehearse and test teams and processes using our proprietary communication simulator.
• 24/7 live crisis response to support you in the midst of a crisis.

How confident are your teams to respond during a crisis?
The communications team and key spokespeople are usually the most externally-facing function in a crisis. Implementing a process of continuous improvement, empowers individuals and teams to perform at their best.

Our crisis communication training courses provide participants with both theory and the opportunity to practise their role in secure, simulated conditions. Courses include:

• Crisis communication best practice
• Crisis media spokesperson training
• Press office and media skills training
• Media response team training
• Relative and community response team training
• Social media crisis management

Crisis communications exercises provide a motivating learning experience for a communications team or wider function, whilst checking the strength of policies, structures and processes. Using a realistic scenario, we explore how teams would establish objectives, set priorities and agree strategy. We test how they would align and coordinate activities with other teams, such as the strategic crisis management team, operational teams and even teams from external stakeholders such as regulators, emergency services and partners. The exercise will unfold through a variety of realistic injects delivered by role players and exercise facilitators to test content generation, external delivery and team-working.

Where can you learn from experience?
After a crisis is over, it is important to assess the performance of the entire crisis response. Our reviews can help you to improve crisis preparedness by examining the quality of the leadership displayed, resilience of existing structures and processes and effectiveness of the team as a whole. We work with those who were involved in the crisis response and with the wider stakeholder community, to assess the impact the crisis had on the organisation and its reputation. We also provide advice and delivery support as the organisation looks to win back trust and recover reputation.