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Creating Effective Communication Plans and Exercises – Part 3 of 3

Posted by reginaphelps Jul 23, 2011

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve covered how to create a communication matrix and how to create communication templates. But once you have these done what’s next? The answer is quite simple…exercise, exercise, exercise. And after that…exercise some more! After you create your matrix and craft your messages, the next step is to exercise your communication plan. Here are a few helpful hints:

Exercise your Plans

Testing your communication plans is key – how else will you know it’s going to work when you need it to? For a successful exercise begin with answering a simple question: Why am I doing this? In other words, what do you hope to get out of it? Answering this will help you develop your objectives. Your objectives should assess the ability of your communications team to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.

Ask the Simple Question

The next step is to create your exercise narrative. You should create a realistic scenario that will deliver help you reach your objectives. Once you know what the situation will be, create your exercise deliverables. Your team may need to create some or all of the following: an employee text message, a company website message, a press release, Facebook, Twitter and other social media responses, a client message, or an investor relations message. You should also have the messages you’ll be sending to the response teams crafted so you’re prepared to start resolving the issue as well.

Effective communication is the key to reputation management and the only way to ensure that your people and brand are protected during an emergency is to be prepared ahead of time. Understand who needs to be communicated to in various scenarios, how you’re going to reach them, and what message you’ll be sending them. But planning isn’t enough; you have to test as well. Create realistic scenarios and practice executing your communication plan so you know what works, what doesn’t work, and where you can improve.

Where do you get good ideas for the exercise narrative? Look at your hazard risk assessment, Business Impact Analysis (BIA), previous exercise reports, or current timely local and regional topics in the news.

I have been designing about 100 exercises per year since 1982 and have recently authored a book on the topic…check it out at www.ChandiMedia.com and let me know what you think.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Remember, practice does, make perfect! The goal is to "fall back to your level of training" when you really need it…the more you practice, the goal is that you don't fall back too far!

:-)

Feel free to reach out to me with any questions…I would be happy to chat!

806 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: incident, crisis_communication, communication, emergency, management, exercise

Creating Effective Communication Plans and Exercises – Part 1 of 3

Posted by reginaphelps Jul 11, 2011

Communication Plans and Exercises - The Key to Your Success

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over my years in the business continuity and emergency management space, it’s that creating a communication plan is hard, and exercising those plans is even harder. Companies often struggle with ensuring the right messages are sent to the right people during business impacting events. The reasons communication can be so hard and ineffective include timeliness, content, poor response choices, and incomplete or incorrect targeting. How companies react in difficult situations is critical to their reputation, and a good communication plan is important for reputation management. Over the years, I’ve developed plans and exercises specifically to help companies develop a more effective communication strategy.

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting a series of tips to ensure the effectiveness of your communication plans and exercises. Here’s the first:

Create a Communication Matrix

A communication matrix is a simple and valuable tool that helps you map out who needs to be communicated to, who is responsible for that communication, and what vehicle you should use to communicate to them. First, identify all of the stakeholders that you may need to communicate with after any type of incident. Second, determine who the internal “owner” of that communication relationship is. For example, HR typically owns communications to employees. Lastly, specify what tools you’ll use to communicate to each group. Is the website the best way to communicate to your clients, or is social media like Facebook and Twitter? Do your employees need to be sent a text message, or a phone call? Answering these questions will help you determine what tools to use.

Here is a sample of what a simple matrix looks like: