Mass Communication

I've been asked on many occasions to provide a quick checklist when it comes to managing incident and crisis communications for a workforce (not a crisis team or strategic communications). It is not as simple as you may first think, nor is it as simple as many vendors make out that you can simply 'send a message'. Like any aspect of your business, your must consider a resilient approach to communications, have backup plans and alternate tools at hand. Consider the following questions:

• How can you convey, as simply and concisely as possible what has happened or is happening, what that means to the individual and what their next steps are? This can be more straight forward if you consider and prepare template messages you can reuse and adapt during the incident.

• How are you going to handle responses and requests for assistance if an incident impacts a large number of people and can you triage and reach out to each individual or continue to mass message all impacted? You may need to escalate assistance to an assistance provider in some cases, is that something you can track beyond the escalation?

• Does the messaging solution you use give you clear stats on who has received your message, on what channel (i.e. SMS, mobile app etc.), if it has been read (more typical in apps) and if not delivered, why?

• Should you message travellers, expats, commuters, locals etc. in the impacted location differently? This will depend on the number impacted and whether your solution provides a mechanism to select based off the type of location used when looking at who was potentially impacted

• Does your message solution allow you to continue subdivide the target audience based off their responses, message delivery status and situation? You may need to handle individuals or groups differently based of this.

• How can you continue to monitor the ongoing situation after the initial event triggers? Often events may impact people, location, transit and services over days and even weeks before normality might resume.

• If you are not directly managing the messaging, a 3rd party is doing this on your behalf, are the criteria clear on what is communicated and response process in place? This is vital when working with external partners such as medical and security assistance providers.

Hope these points and the attached image are of some help. If you want to chat further on these points, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I would love to hear your stories both positive and negative when it comes to crisis comms.