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Prepare for emerging threats in 2024: Strategies for enabling business continuity
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Crisis communications messaging best practices

One of the main objectives of a crisis communications plan is to ensure critical information will be efficiently communicated among responders and stakeholders during an incident. Incidents can take the shape of a wide variety of scenarios for different organizations in every vertical of industry, but all require timely and effective messaging and communication to resolve as quickly and professionally as possible. Ultimately, regardless of the scenario type, it is most crucial that you achieve the most basic communication goal of every incident, which is to get the:

  • Right information to the
  • Right people at the
  • Right time so they can make the
  • Right decisions and issue the
  • Right communications

There are four areas to focus your attention if you want to have more timely AND effective communications and achieve the crisis communications goal stated above:

  1. Communication governance document.
  2. Crisis communication plan.
  3. Pre-written and approved templates.
  4. Effective communication tools.

Each one of these four areas places a crucial role in fulfilling crisis communications best practices, and being under-invested in any one particular area can mean the downfall of your entire communications plan. Keep in mind, simply having a crisis communications plan is not enough unless it has been vigorously tested to identify strategic gaps or weaknesses. Emergency management and continuity planning expert Regina Phelps dives deeper into the specifics of each of these 4 focus areas and extensively discusses the process to achieving a complete crisis communications plan in our resource series: Crisis Communications Messaging Best Practices.  Regina Phelps is the founder of Emergency Management & Safety Solutions, a consulting company specializing in incident management, exercise design, and continuity and pandemic planning and has been providing consultation and educational speaking services to clients since 1982. Access the Crisis Communication Messaging Best Practices resource series from Regina:

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