Coronavirus Covid19 Crisis Communication Tip: It’s as Simple as A-B-C

By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

While many companies and brands are responding and communicating about the coronavirus (Covid 19), other individuals are questioning whether coronavirus fears are being blown out of proportion.

The best crisis communications tip I can give you is as simple as A-B-C:

Always Be Communicating.

In the grand scheme, it doesn’t matter if you, personally think things are being blown out of proportion or not.

What matters is that you are managing the expectations of your employees, your customers, and your stakeholders.

Replace fear with facts.

And because things change on a daily basis, you must be prepared to communicate constantly. In other words – Always Be Communicating.

When you manage expectations, you manage, mitigate, or eliminate fear.

Here are a few things to communicate about:

• What should employees do to remain safe?
• What should customers do to remain safe?
• Are any of your operations or services changing?
• If everything is operating as normal, under what circumstances will change be enacted?
• If changes are enacted, how will you continue to serve your audiences amid the changes?

You and your organization will be affected in some way. How severe the effect is can depend upon how effectively and how frequently you communicate.

Take your audience away from worry and take them to a place of informed decision-making.

Crisis communications and media training expert Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC is based in New Orleans. Organizations on five continents have relied on him to write their crisis communications plans and to train their spokespeople. He is the author of “Don’t Talk to the Media Until…”

More crisis communications articles:

How to Use Social Media for Crisis Communications

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

4 Steps Every Company Needs to Take in Order to Avoid the Default Spokesperson

Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash