CRISIS COMMS EXERCISES

Your financial records are hacked.

A natural disaster destroys the plant where your operations are based.

An act of terror shuts down the country.

Each situation requires a rapid response on the part of your company.

And while you can’t prevent every crisis, you can certainly prepare for the unexpected by participating in crisis communications exercises.

Benefits of a Crisis Communications Exercise

You will feel the pressure of the media in a safe exercise environment.
You will learn how to communicate with the media, including a schedule to provide updates.
You will also learn about the importance of communicating with key stakeholders i.e. you should reach out to them immediately before they learn about your crisis/ response in the media.

How Do You Do All of This?

Two words: Preparation and Practice

When you go through an exercise, you discover what you don’t know. Then you can use those lessons learned to take the necessary steps to improve your response in the future.

Specific Lessons Learned

Lessons learned vary from company to company. They include:

Realizing that you need to create or update your crisis plan.
You will learn how to communicate with the media, including a schedule to provide updates.
Realizing that you haven’t identified enough (or any) spokespeople to handle a crisis.
Realizing that you don’t have a team dedicated to handling social media during a crisis.
Realizing that you don’t have a master list of key stakeholders to contact in the event of a crisis. (And/ or assigning someone to contact your key stakeholders)
Realizing that you haven’t assigned people to teams in the event of a crisis.
Realizing that you don’t have the names of government agency officials, never mind have relationships with those officials, that you will need to contact in a crisis.

END RESULT

By the end of the exercise, not only will you be a much stronger team for having gone
through it, you will have the tools and experience to implement changes in your own crisis communications plans.

Crisis Comms Experience

McGrath Comm’s experience with crisis communications exercises dates back twenty years when Noeleen McGrath first started working on National Level Exercises with the Department of Homeland Security.

NLEs are comprehensive government exercises that include players at all levels of government. The goal is to prepare and test players from local “ boots on the ground” first responders… all the way up to the White House.

Corporate Crisis Comms

Over the years, our body of crisis comms work has evolved to include a variety of scenarios, specific to the challenges that individual industries face.

Together, we’ll work with you to create and customize an exercise that will test your team.

At the end of the exercise, you will understand your team’s unique strengths. We will also review “Lessons Learned” and identify areas for improvement.

Whether you’d like to practice your crisis comms response to a natural disaster, a hacker breech or a terrorist event, reach out to McGrath Comm to help you prepare before a crisis happens.

Ask How We Can Help

To learn more about how we can help you prepare for a crisis. Please click the Learn More link to get started.