How important is an effective crisis communication?

Author : Konstantina Karatzoudi

How important is an effective crisis communication?

It seems that crises and disasters such as natural, man-made disasters and various other disruptive events are an inevitable part of our world. It is critical to organizations to be prepared, handle effectively and overcome such crises, otherwise they can end to be destructive.

It is the way in which an organization handles such crisis situations that determines how the public will respond. When an organization’s actions can be harmful to humans and cause environmental and economic issues, the public and media reactions cannot be avoided. Therefore, it is up to the organization to choose if it will react responsibly in order to prevent future losses or not. It should take seriously into consideration that the possibility of reputational or financial losses still exists even though its crisis preparedness in advance or its response after a crisis has occured.

Effective crisis communication planning is, thus, essential to the success of an organization and it is obvious that the organization has to be quick, consistent and open to communicate correctly during a crisis. Being quick helps the organization to use information in making an active response, while being slow to respond is possible to give free space to others to spread out inaccurate information or attack the organization.

Furthermore, being consistent prevents from misunderstanding among the organization’s communications as one person takes the responsibility to respond during a crisis by keeping consistency throughout his/her communication. At the end, being open and visible during communication reveals that the organization is willing to keep an honest relationship with its stakeholders and gives the message that it does not have something negative to hide and the sign that the situation is under control.

What are your thoughts about crisis communication plans ?

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