Emergency Communication

The efforts of a specialist in emergency communications career should be conducted simultaneously on two strategic areas, which are both of fundamental importance: the external (population and news) and the internal (professional) area.

In this case a team of crisis managers should consider the psychological barriers between the external environment and organization of personnel, i.e. the internal environment. These barriers have been described in the paragraph on the general psychological characteristics of crisis situations.

And so, the first strategic direction is the internal environment of the organization. On the first strategic direction (internal environment of the organization), the work is constructed as follows:

Formation of a crisis team;
Develop a strategy for the organization’s personnel.

The second strategic direction is the external environment of the organization

On the second strategic direction (external environment of the organization) are working in the directions:

The development version needs to be issued, as already noted, as soon as possible and should have a common definition of the vector orientation of the crisis. In opinion of emergency communications experts, in the event of crises that are outward-looking, i.e. directly related to the general public, the communication strategy should follow only the logic of openness, and most importantly – honesty. Surprisingly, but these principles make for a decent Crowd Safety Management, too.

In the event of crises which have an internal focus, believe that the work of specialists in public relations should be limited to the interpretation of a situation that would be most consistent with domestic interests of the company. This is due to the fact that crises are related to the internal focus more on the organization, which may be due, for example, confidential information, etc. Thus, in this case, the strategy also follows the logic of open organization, but the principle of fairness is replaced by the principle of selecting the desired interpretation of the situation.

In determining the list of target (in terms of crisis strategy) titles are very important to take into account the directional information policy specific media. Information about whose interests are lobbying the target edition allows the team to crisis managers to clearly understand why such a position is taken by the media in a given situation, predict further action by the publication and provides an opportunity to build your own materials to this logic.

Identifying target audiences and develop a strategy to work with them.

At this stage, the most important thing clearly identify urgent priority target audiences to work just with them.

Plan developed by the author is describing the combined company’s actions in crisis situations and may be a practical tool.

The plan includes the basic building blocks of work in a crisis situation. The development plan shall be performed by external consultants or PR in the communications model crisis management.