Relevant Contents
Need Tailored Business Continuity Insights?
Contact Us Now for Personalized Guidance!
When a crisis at an organization is accompanied by a breakdown in communications, potentially manageable impacts have a way of increasing dramatically. Fortunately, companies can avert such breakdowns by taking a handful of common-sense steps, provided they act ahead of time.
Related: MHA’s Best Crisis Communications Resources
The High Cost of Poor Crisis Communication
Crisis communication is an aspect of business continuity where the potential exists for many organizations to achieve a significant easy win.
Improving at crisis communication is much easier than meeting such other core BC goals as achieving alignment between the business units and IT or persuading management to support the BC effort. The steps involved are neither technical nor expensive. They aren’t even likely to ruffle many feathers.
All the same, many organizations have not thought seriously about what they might need to communicate in a crisis or how they would go about it. The all-too-common result is that the costs of the outages they experience are unnecessarily magnified.
Breakdowns in communication during an event—such as confusion over how to communicate with staff, convene the crisis management team, and interact with the media—routinely prolong outages, increase confusion, and undermine companies’ reputations.
There is only one aspect of doing better at crisis communication that makes it even a little bit hard: all the steps have to be taken in advance. Like many areas of business continuity, success depends far more on quiet preparation than on improvisation during an event.
Ten Practical Tips for Stronger Crisis Communication
The ten steps below describe practical actions organizations can take to move from confusion to coordination during a crisis.
1. Prepare scripts in advance
Organizations that prepare their public messaging about emergencies from scratch during the event routinely suffer delays and make mistakes in getting announcements out. Companies should develop draft scripts for the types of incidents they are most likely to face and get them approved ahead of time. This greatly improves the chances messaging will be prompt, accurate, and productive.
2. Identify and train the right spokespeople
During a crisis, untrained, unauthorized, and competing spokespeople can cause messaging chaos when communicating internally or externally. Organizations should decide in advance who is authorized to speak on their behalf to news organizations or on social media. These individuals should be properly trained, and everyone else at the organization should be instructed to refrain from making public comments about the organization.
3. Establish a clear system for internal crisis communication
Organizations should define how they will communicate internally during a crisis, whether through an emergency notification system (ENS), email, collaboration platforms, or another mechanism. A clear system helps prevent the chaos of uncoordinated calls, emails, and side conversations.
4. Keep contact lists accurate and complete
Up-to-date contact information is foundational. Review contact lists at least twice a year, and ideally quarterly. Even when HR systems are used, critical details such as personal mobile numbers are often missing or outdated, leading to delays when time matters most.
5. Review integration between the response and communication teams
Business continuity, crisis management, IT disaster recovery, cyber response, and other teams must be integrated. Plans should clearly define touchpoints, crossover roles, or check-in expectations to ensure communication is coordinated rather than fragmented across silos.
6. Identify and define communication methods in advance
Organizations should explicitly define which communication methods will be used under different conditions and how they will be activated. If email is unavailable, will Microsoft Teams, SMS, or another channel be used? How will people be told to switch? These details are often assumed rather than planned.
7. Define activation rules and decision-making procedures
Confusion frequently arises during ambiguous events rather than obvious crises. Organizations should define when communication and response teams are activated and who has the authority to make those decisions. Exercising these judgment calls is just as important as practicing the mechanics.
8. Define notification and team assembly processes
Beyond deciding whether to activate, organizations should define how teams are notified and assembled. This includes specifying tools, timelines, and expectations for joining collaboration platforms. These processes should be tested, not merely documented.
9. Monitor and manage social media
Social media should be monitored during incidents, with a clear plan for when and how to respond. Different platforms serve different audiences and require different formats, but the core message should remain consistent. Silence can allow misinformation or speculation to spread.
10. Consider external communications support
Some organizations choose to have a public relations firm available to support the crisis management team during significant events. They may not be needed for every incident, but having pre-arranged support and criteria for when to engage it can be valuable, especially for organizations with limited in-house experience.
Individually, each of these steps improves a specific aspect of emergency communication. Together, they can prevent the confusion, delay, and distraction that so often turn manageable incidents into costly crises.
Turning Planning Into Performance
Common crisis communication failures include chaotic public messaging, confusion over the use of collaboration platforms, and failure to monitor social media. These shortcomings have a way of magnifying the costs and impacts of otherwise manageable disruptions.
Fortunately, organizations can improve their ability to communicate during a crisis by taking a small number of common-sense steps. Taken together, the ten steps outlined above can help organizations replace confusion with coordination by defining who communicates, how messages are shared, when teams are activated, and how narratives are managed during an event.
Organizations looking to strengthen their crisis communication capabilities don’t have to do it alone. MHA Consulting works with clients to assess readiness, integrate communication with crisis and continuity planning, and build practical approaches that hold up under real-world conditions. Contact MHA to learn how we can help.
Further Reading
Richard Long
Richard Long is one of MHA’s practice team leaders for Technology and Disaster Recovery related engagements. He has been responsible for the successful execution of MHA business continuity and disaster recovery engagements in industries such as Energy & Utilities, Government Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Risk Management, Travel & Entertainment, Consumer Products, and Education. Prior to joining MHA, Richard held Senior IT Director positions at PetSmart (NASDAQ: PETM) and Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT) and has been a senior leader across all disciplines of IT. He has successfully led international and domestic disaster recovery, technology assessment, crisis management and risk mitigation engagements.
