Crisis Communications
Purpose
Crisis communications manages what stakeholders know, when they know it, and through which channel - protecting safety, reputation, and trust while meeting legal obligations.
Concepts you know must include
- Crisis communications team with a designated, trained spokesperson and backup; one voice discipline.
- Stakeholder mapping - employees and families, customers, suppliers, media, regulators, investors, community.
- Pre-scripted templates and holding statements for foreseeable scenarios.
- Approval workflow - who clears messages, and the expedited path when speed matters.
- Notification technology - mass notification, SMS, voice, email, social; redundancy and confirmation of receipt.
- Dark site / alternate communications channels when primary systems are down.
- Rumour and social media monitoring, misinformation response.
- Regulatory and contractual notification deadlines (breach, safety, environmental).
Traps in questions
- Confusing notification (alerting people) with crisis communications (managing messages and stakeholders).
- Waiting for complete facts before saying anything.
- Letting multiple spokespeople speak independently.
- Forgetting internal audiences - staff hear rumours first otherwise.
- Ignoring legal notification clocks in favour of reputation management.
Rule of thumb
Issue the first statement fast, factual, and time-boxed: what is known, what is being done, when the next update comes. Never speculate; never say "no comment."
Worked example: A system outage strands customers. Within 30 minutes: acknowledge the outage, state that restoration work is underway, give a next-update time. Employees get a parallel internal message with talking points so they do not improvise.