The Right Message: Aligning Communication, Relationships, and Timing During Crises

Crisis communication comes with a lot of rules and recommendations. Move fast but be accurate. Be transparent, but don’t make people panic. Follow the script but be quick to adapt. Practice but don’t over-rehearse. It gets complicated, quickly.

Thankfully, those contradictions have spurred notable interest in what makes for good crisis communication and where it goes wrong. While many books have been (and will be) written on the topic, here we boil it down to three essential elements of effective communication during a crisis: content, timing, and relationships.

The Right Message

Crisis communication often goes awry when the spokesperson or the organization neglects to address perceptions and fears from the public. Beyond the basic facts of an incident, communicators need to add victim-centered language to their messaging, says Judy Pal, founder and principal at 10-8 Communications. Pal has more than 40 years’ experience in public relations management, and she often coaches law enforcement and corporate security teams about crisis communications.

She recommends thinking about crisis communications using “M to the third power”— message, method, and messenger—to ensure outreach and responses are appropriately people-centric. The message should contain victim-centered words that keep the people affected by the crisis top-of-mind. The method should clearly demonstrate the weight of the incident. For instance, social media posts alone can feel like a throwaway, compared to a public meeting with the people affected. The messenger also matters; in a serious crisis, the CEO might need to be the face of the response to demonstrate the organization’s dedication to responding properly. For investigations, the security director may play a supporting role in communicating recent developments. This role will be uncomfortable for CEOs and other executives, since will be delivering bad news.

“But it shows transparency, it shows that we have a CEO who has a finger on the pulse of the company, it shows responsibility, and it shows that we are willing to stand up and deal with whatever has happened,” Pal says. “That’s extraordinarily important, and that’s one of the first things that is going to help maintain a level of trust.”

Without that communication, even good intentions go awry. Consider the 2014 chemical storage tank leak outside Charleston, West Virginia, Pal says. The leak released 7,500 gallons of crude 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol into the ground along the Elk River, contaminating drinking water for up to 300,000 people. The company that owned the storage tanks—Freedom Industries—refused early media inquiries and its CEO gave a 10-minute press conference more than 24 hours after the local water company instructed customers to stop using tap water.

Workers began cleaning up the spill promptly, but the delay in communicating with customers about the spill and contradictions in the CEO’s statement caused serious damage to the company’s public reputation.

If, instead, the CEO had come out promptly, notified the public about the leak, collaborated with local water officials, and trucked in bottled water to tide people over, the story would have turned out quite differently, Pal says.

“As soon as someone else is pointing the finger at your agency, you are losing,” she adds.

Another way to frame compassionate messaging is to think CAP: care, action, and perspective, says Dean Cunningham, segment development manager for public safety at Axis Communications. Previously, Cunningham spent eight years working as the police public safety information officer for the City of Boulder, Colorado.

Care. During a crisis, Cunningham says people are often angry, grieving, and confused. In this situation, “you can’t fire policy and procedures and statistics at them,” he adds. “You have to talk to them about caring for the community.” Human-centric and compassionate communication grounds the situation and enables people to process information.

Action. This aspect of messaging communicates what responders are doing and what they are asking others to do. Doing this both informs and empowers the audience.

Perspective. This tenet provides context about what information is currently verified, that the investigation or incident is ongoing, and that more information will come out later, Cunningham says. Officials may not have numbers on how many people were injured or how long an investigation will take, but it’s comforting to receive context on why that information is not currently available and when people can expect to be updated. Sharing this information can buy responders some time and goodwill.

The action element is especially valuable in gaining trust and attention. During a crisis, people are understandably nervous and looking for guidance. Giving clear and attainable instructions feels reassuring and builds a relationship between the organization and the audience.

Pal boils the community and agency angle down to three key questions: Are my loved ones and I safe? How does this affect me? What should I be doing?

“We get very good at talking about what we’re doing to manage a crisis, but if we provide people with information about what they can be doing to help, or to help themselves, we’re taking people out of a victim mindset to a survivor mindset, and that’s really the goal of crisis communications,” Pal says.

That sense of agency is critical to people as a whole, in and out of crisis, says Greg Shea, PhD, senior fellow at the Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management.

“If I don’t believe that there’s something I can do to affect this thing that matters so much to me, people lose their sense of agency, which is a fancy way of saying their sense that what they do matters in some way,” he says. “That’s really crippling for human beings.”

In a high-stress situation, Pal adds that offering small, concrete tasks that matter to others can help people maintain or reestablish their sense of agency. The request could be as simple as “stay away from the area while emergency crews respond,” or organizations could ask for help with amplifying official messaging or flagging when rumors arise online so the company can investigate or debunk them, she says. Those requests offer actions with tangible value so people can feel like they are contributing to the response effort.

If I don’t believe that there’s something I can do to affect this thing that matters so much to me, people lose their sense of agency… That’s really crippling for human beings.

The Fast Message

Your message might be perfect, informative, and compassionate, but if it comes out 5 hours after the news of an incident broke on social media, you’ve already lost.

The timeline has compressed in recent years, especially after news of major incidents started breaking on social media hours before it made it onto primetime news, Pal says.

“If a corporation is not doing social media listening, they are going to be behind the ball,” she says. “Then, what happens with social media is that the artificial intelligence algorithms will then amplify that, so you’ll have an echo chamber of anything bad, which is going to travel extraordinarily fast.”

Instead of a golden hour, organizations have a mere golden 10 minutes to put out an initial holding statement to frame the narrative of the incident and position themselves as the go-to source for information. Using the M3 and CAP frameworks, organizations can have the shell of a holding or stand-by statement ready, and leaders will just need to fill in incident-specific details.

“Speed becomes the number one thing, and the key to that is essentially being able to put something out that frames the narrative, so there is some kind of basic information out there,” Pal adds. “You don’t have to have a lot of information to put out about something bad that happens other than: We are aware, we are responding, and our number one concern is our clients, people flying on our airplanes, or whatever that is.”

The speed element helps undercut the power of malicious actors who might try to take advantage of a crisis to create a false narrative that will affect the organization’s brand and potentially affect its ability to respond to the incident. Those bad actors will leverage AI tools and bots to scrape the Internet for news stories that could spark negative emotions, since those will make stories go viral.

“If your company is involved with a crisis that has created fear, anger, or divisiveness, there’s a good chance that one of those bots is going to pick it up, and then you’re going to have that amplified by sock puppets, trolls, and bots,” Pal says. “And then you’re going to be dealing with a much bigger issue down the road.” 

In the immediate aftermath of an incident, organizations should provide more information in 20- to 60-minute intervals, she says. That doesn’t mean a news conference every 20 minutes, but instead post consistent updates that the public can easily find, such as recurring updates on social media, a single incident response updates page on the company website, or press releases, interspersed with larger press conferences if warranted. During long-term responses, Pal recommends at least daily updates, even if there’s no significant change in response status.

The speaker matters, too. Unless the incident is a weekslong case, Cunningham prefers to have the same spokesperson throughout the crisis for consistency. That familiar face establishes a sense of trust and continuity with the audience, and having the same speaker funneling all the information means that he or she doesn’t need to wait and double-check what a different spokesperson said 2 hours ago before answering questions.

“The good part of it was you were super consistent,” he says. “The bad part is it was your face associated with whatever happened for eternity.”

Consistency requires accuracy, too. Even though organizations are rushing to put out information, don’t overstep and say something based on hearsay or opinion, Cunningham says. If there’s video evidence available of an incident, including bodycam footage, the spokesperson should personally review it before speaking about it to avoid having to backtrack later.

Before speaking with the press, try to spend a few minutes anticipating the questions they will ask and developing your CAP messaging in response.

“If you have a couple of bullet points for each one of those things (care, action, perspective), you have six things you can always talk about,” Cunningham says. “If you can be ready for those six things, you can answer a lot of press conference questions.”

Your CAP messaging should change as the incident unfolds to keep your answers from feeling repetitive and empty as time goes on. Leaning on the CAP model keeps communications aligned and cohesive, while providing a fallback for crisis communicators to pivot to if a reporter asks a tough question, Cunningham says.

“You only need to get trapped once to make that a really bad feeling,” he says. “So, take a minute to rehearse.”

Organizations can also prepare by having a publicly inaccessible rumor control page at the ready that will be dedicated to a specific crisis, Pal advises. First, this gives people and reporters one solid place to go to get official information about the crisis. Second, it provides correct information for artificial intelligence tools to scrape, rather than pulling from viral mis- and disinformation sources.

The Long-Term Message

“You cannot build relationships under crisis,” Cunningham says. “If you can take a minute to talk with your sheriff, the county commissioners, the city council, or even the chiefs of police and understand what they want and how they want things done, you can start to mitigate some of the potential problems.”

But each stakeholder in a crisis has different priorities and pressures, and it’s worth examining them.

Local stakeholders. Cunningham would reach out to activist groups and other highly vocal community members as well to ask what they felt he or the police department were doing wrong or what they wanted to do differently in the future.

“You may not like these conversations, but at least you’ll understand where they’re coming from,” he says. “I thought of it more as recon, trying to understand what they need, what they’re going to be looking for. If I can give them that information, then it avoids them asking the question or making a big deal that we didn’t release some information.”

Cunningham also strongly recommends understanding the political pressures at play. Speak with elected and appointed officials to discuss the information you release during incidents and what their concerns might be.

On a broader scale, attend community meetings to listen to what matters to residents. Then “You can tailor your messaging,” he says. “The information that may be important in Baltimore might be different in Fort Collins. In might be different in Sacramento. So, it’s important that you understand your community and what they think is important.”

You cannot build relationships under crisis.

The press. Remember that the press does not work for you, Cunningham remarks. Reporters work to gather, condense, and provide information to the public, and sometimes that means writing about what you or your organization did wrong. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea to build an effective working relationship with news agencies in your area.

“You’re going to be working with these folks, so get to know them,” he says. “We would go out and have coffee, we would talk about what they needed, what we needed from them, what they expected, and what we expected from them.”

Taking time to build a relationship with the press does not mean you will get reporters to change their coverage. But if something happens—a snafu during a recording or a misstated fact you’d like corrected—the established relationship might help you proactively address it, Cunningham adds.

Reporters who know the spokesperson will also call him or her for fact-checks. Cunningham recommends checking those notes or quotes for factual accuracy, not to try and sway the reporter toward more favorable coverage.

“Try not to take some of that personally,” he says. “They’ve got a job to do, and they’re going to write what they need to write.”

Internal departments. Tabletop exercises are a fantastic way to practice crisis communications and study the different priorities and pressures affecting internal partners and departments, Cunningham says. Teams should practice both manmade problems (such as fraud, a major environmental accident, or workplace violence incidents) and natural disasters to identify who would run point on each type of crisis and how communication internally and externally should change. Determine who is in charge of rumor control, messaging cadence, and social media posts.

“Not only does the practice of the tabletop just give you more chances to be better, but also you get to understand other people’s competing interests when it comes to releasing information,” he says.

C-suites. “Security heads have an extraordinary challenge, because they often come from a law enforcement or public safety background, and they are very used to a culture of ‘We need to get out with this information, and we need to let the community know what’s going on,’” Pal says. “But then you have a C-suite with a board of directors who say ‘No one needs to know about this, nothing to see here. If we say anything about it, then people will find out and stop using our product, our service.’

“This becomes a huge challenge for the security executive in the C-suite to push back so the CEOs understand that we are long past the days of ‘If we don’t say anything, maybe no one will find out,’” she continues. “Someone’s going to find out. It’s either going to be internally leaked, or there’ll be a whistleblower, but someone’s going to find out. And that might be the biggest challenge of the security executive today: Selling the C-suite on getting the information out quickly.”

Legal counsel is often the person advising a delay in communication, since he or she is leery of information getting out that could fuel litigation, Pal explains. But smart CEOs will listen to other advisors, too, including communications officials who will explain the ramifications of saying nothing versus providing basic information.

“Most companies find that if they sit on something and they hope that it’ll just go away, it’s going to be much worse for them than standing up, being brave, saying ‘This was us, this is what we’re doing, and we’re prepared to accept responsibility for it,’” she adds.

Claire Meyer is editor-in-chief of Security Management. She has been writing about the security industry since 2012. Connect with her on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected].