Creating a Crisis Communications Plan

In this KC Academy Crisis Communication Planning course, you will define the crisis, paracrisis, and the goals of crisis communication. During the 5-days, you will share your own experiences and practice identifying potential crises, creating a crisis communication plan, choosing a crisis communication team, and evaluating the plan.

A key component of preparing for a crisis is crafting messages for internal and external stakeholders. Messages must be quick, consistent, and open, and preparing initial statements ahead of time will help leaders and spokespersons communicate effectively during a crisis. You will examine the content of effective initial statements with the opportunity to review real-life examples, evaluating them for quality and success. You will practice addressing difficult questions and criticisms, exploring acceptable and graceful responses.

Once the crisis is over, it's important to review what worked well, what didn't, and to update the crisis communication plan for next time. Reflecting on a real-life example, you will evaluate the response to the crisis and the crisis communication plan itself.

This training course will highlight:

• The different approaches to crisis communications planning
• The types of crisis your organisation could face
• Ways to identify reputational risk for your organisation
• Methods to define your audiences and channels of communication
• Ways to devise effective and appropriate key messages
• How to plan the resources and facilities you need for an effective and timely response.

Objectives

At the end of this training course, you will learn to:

• Analyse a crisis communication plan to ensure that the organisation is prepared for potential crises
• Use the crisis communications plan to drive internal communication during change
• Respond to a paracrisis to prevent full crisis development
• Prepare internal and external messages to respond to stakeholders during a crisis
• Address questions and criticisms from internal and external stakeholders
• Evaluate crisis responses to identify plan improvement opportunities