What does a crisis communication expert actually do?
A former communications manager in public hospitals, public health, and the news industry, I handled crises and emergency response. And I can't emphasise enough the power of early preparation.
In brief
A crisis communication expert helps an organisation prepare long before disaster strikes.
According to Google Search, one of the most searched questions about crisis communication is: What is a crisis communication expert? l’ll attempt to answer that question here. This is based on my own experience working in crisis communication, in some form or another, for more than 20 years.
Firstly, I can’t talk about crisis communication without stressing the importance of early preparation. Because, aside from government departments as a rule, early preparation before a crisis is often overlooked by people. This puts people and reputations at huge risk.
When a crisis is already on your doorstep, the reality is that by then, it’s too late to start preparing. How so? Because you need systems like agreed processes and protocols, in place well before an emergency arrives. That allows you to be organised and ready to respond without delay. The harsh truth is that the lack of preparation and a poor response to a crisis usually damages people, relationships, communities and partnerships long-term, if not forever.
If that’s hard to grasp, imagine you’re a member of the New Zealand All Blacks Rugby Team. By the way, the men’s Rugby World Cup 2027 will be held in Australia. But I digress. If you’ve never heard of rugby, insert your soccer or football team, or basketball team or bowling team, or whatever team lights your fire.
Before your favourite rugby, football, soccer or basketball team ever steps into the stadium or playing field, they need to know the game plan, right? They need to have gone through your team’s playbook and know who is playing what position. Each dedicated team member goes over the game plan, practising and perfecting delivery of their role for weeks and months ahead of the game. Nothing short of obsessed.
Well, the same principles and preparation apply in the real world of crisis communication. Can you imagine the reaction and the result if sports teams turned up on game day without any preparation?
So that brings me back to the question: what does a crisis communication expert actually do? Let me list a few basics:
They help an organisation, team, or leaders to prepare for specific crisis scenarios, or emergencies.
They provide experience, advice and guidance on setting up a crisis communications plan.
They may even hold the pen or write the first draft crisis comms plan for you.
There’s a caveat here, though, with plans: the final version needs to be a collaborative, co-designed operational plan.
They can create tools that your team can use to organise, track, monitor, evaluate and report information.
They can run desktop exercises and interactive simulations, and workshops to train, test and update your crisis preparation and planning.
They can advise, monitor or manage your media relations.
They can usually take care of stakeholder engagement and partner relations such as working closely with multiple government agencies, hospitals, or departments to address an issue that’s in the public eye or an emergency.
This list is very much based on the way I’ve performed, generally speaking, behind-the-scenes functions of crisis communications over the last 20 years.
I was in my late 30s when I started working in crisis work. But I was exposed to it much earlier.
Difficult situations that meet the definition of an organisational, regional or national crisis require a wide set of skills and experience that includes corporate communications, government relations, stakeholder and community engagement, media relations and crisis,risk and emergency communications.
Not to mention that you are often the chief writer, media trainer, communications mentor and risk and emergency comms adviser. And you’re facilitating meetings, or needing to attend to them daily, or twice a day and report back on the daily progress of actions and updates. So being highly organised is a top-notch skill to develop if you haven’t already.
Working in the crisis itself, particularly where media coverage is part and parcel of it with daily press conferences, that’s not for the faint of heart. It is fast-paced and relentless during the crisis period and immediately before it to support the spokesperson and the rest of the organisation.
It truly takes a team approach to do that and look after people, so they are not burnt out by overwork and fatigue. Planning staff breaks and staff rosters as part of a crisis comms plan helps tremendously.
For a while, you have no life, outside of responding to the crisis, particularly if it’s a national, regional or local catastrophe, with high risks.
So I hope this answers the question. I am being as honest as I can be, so that there’s no rose-tinted glasses about what it’s like working in crisis communication at the front and behind the scenes.
If you have a question about crisis communication, let me know and I’ll see if I can respond to it in the next post. Take care,
Vienna Senima