Crisis Management is the process by which your organization deals with a major emergency that threatens to harm the organization, its stakeholders or the general public. If your organization is not prepared, you will incur more damage. Decisions often must be made quickly to limit further damage.
A poor communications plan can undermine an otherwise effective response and recovery effort. The modern era of 24×7 news cycle and constant social media postings make anyone with a smartphone a possible “reporter”. A well designed crisis communications plan will allow the organization to better respond in an efficient and effective manner with timely messaging to internal and external stakeholders. A comprehensive crisis communications plan will include an explanation of communication policies, specific roles and responsibilities for messaging, stakeholder groups and message templates (geared towards traditional communication channels and social media) that enable consistent communications.
How EPS Can Assist
EPS can aid in developing a crisis communications plan including templated responses to as many potential crises as possible. We also train the crisis communication/public affairs team and design exercises that will develop team proficiencies and enable other elements of the emergency operations plan and the incident management team.