Crisis Communications: who should you tell first?

When a crisis hits the most important thing to do is take control of the situation and your response to it.

The key audience is your employees and you need to tell them what’s happening first. Your staff can be your best ally or your worst nightmare in a crisis. Rumours quickly fill an information void and take on a life of their own.

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “A rumour gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on” and that’s never been more true than in this age of social media and 24/7 news outlets.

The last thing you want is to have an employee talking to the media off message and off-the-cuff as happened when a John Hopkins Hospital nurse gave an impromptu interview to Fox News during the deadly shooting incident last Thursday.

An effective crisis response is getting ahead of it by making sure everyone in your organization knows these three things:

1. what has happened
2. what you are doing to remedy it
3. only a designated spokesperson speaks to the media.