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Your October Assignment: The Truth About Vulnerability Assessments During COVID-19

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

Sexiest, teasing headline you’ve ever read, huh? Makes you want to put on your old t-shirt that says, “Only Real Men & Women Do Regular Vulnerability Assessments.”

Joking aside, you need to get on this. Here is the how and why…

We’re 8-9 months into a crisis that should have ended somewhere in the 90 to 120 day range.

Early on, it was your only crisis to manage and for which you had to communicate. I’m proud of you. After the first surge of communications, many organizations fell into COVID fatigue. That was followed by COVID limbo.

But now COVID-19 is part of a compound crisis and it is your responsibility to assess the threats and vulnerabilities that your organization could face next.

Here’s What’s Changed

Generally in the world of public relations and crisis communications, an expert would say the first and the best thing you should do as part of the crisis communication process is to assess every vulnerability that could affect the revenue, reputation, and brand of your organization.

Your initial Vulnerability Assessment is Step 1, and it becomes your roadmap for your next four steps, which include:

  • Step 2: Writing your crisis communications plan
  • Step 3: Writing a library of pre-written statements for your employees, media, customers, community, and other stakeholders.
  • Step 4: Media training your spokespeople (including virtual training)
  • Step 5: Crisis communications drills (including virtual drills)

Traditionally you would do an initial Vulnerability Assessment, followed by quarterly meetings with managers to identify and prepare for new or emerging vulnerabilities. For example, COVID-19 was not really on anyone’s Vulnerability Assessment one year ago. Nine months ago at your quarterly meeting, COVID-19 and all of the issues around it should have been added to your list.

Once on the list, you would update your crisis communications plan if necessary, adding pre-written news releases for COVID-19 protocol, response, outbreaks, and potential fatalities.

More is Better

We’re now recommending to our clients that the frequency should be increased from quarterly to monthly, because most organizations are facing compound crises, such as COVID + hurricane, COVID + wildfires, COVID + you name it.

Would you like some additional resources?

  1. Watch today’s video. It has a clip from a crisis communications Master Class I recently taught for SituationHub.com
  2. Watch the entire Master Class
  3. Watch our 5-part video series on the five steps to effective crisis communications.
  4. Get help with your Vulnerability Assessment by scheduling a free, confidential phone call with us.

COVID-19 isn’t going away anytime soon. Please prepare for what comes next. Please step up the frequency of your Vulnerability Assessments.

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:

Covid-19 Crisis Communications Webinar Recording

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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

Crisis Plans, Crisis Preparation, Crisis Practice & Crisis Perfections = Crisis Communications Expert

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By Gerard Braud, CSP, Fellow IEC

This is a 5-day crisis communications challenge. With only four months left in 2019, you are being challenged to focus on your crisis communications plan with crisis preparation, crisis practice, and ultimately, a focus on how you can be the expert who achieves crisis perfection.

In January 2019, you were issued a dare to participate in the five steps to effective crisis communications video course. Some of you have taken the challenge and you’ve become expert communicators. Some of you kicked the can down the road. No worries can-kickers. You can become a crisis communications expert in the four remaining months of 2019.

The dare to complete the 5-step video course still stands. I challenge you to take 10 minutes a day for five days to watch, learn, then implement the five steps. Register with this link.

In 4 months you can complete the 5 steps:

  1. A crisis vulnerability assessment
  2. Writing or updating your crisis communications plan
  3. Writing your library of pre-written crisis news releases
  4. Media training your spokespeople for crisis communications news conferences
  5. Conducting a crisis communications drill to test your plan, your spokespeople, and your team

Here is today’s tip for you to complete step 1 – your Vulnerability Assessment:

Your mind has been pre-occupied in June & July with vacation. In August your distraction is getting the kids back in school. Use September to refocus and start with either conducting a baseline Vulnerability Assessment or updating your existing Vulnerability Assessment.

In order to write a crisis communications plan and a library of pre-written news releases for when “it” hits the fan, you have to know what your “it” is.

If you’ve never done this before, open an Excel spreadsheet and start writing down every sort of situation that could become a crisis that would cause you to generate a possible crisis response.

Keep in mind that this must go beyond a list of emergency situations. While emergencies are usually something that can trigger a crisis communications plan, non-emergencies are often more likely to trigger your crisis communication plan. This includes executive misbehavior, such as sexual harassment and embezzlement.

Once you’ve written down everything you can think of, separate them by classes, such as, natural disasters, crime, environmental, labor, activists, violence, workplace injury/fatality and so on.

Now start making visits to executives, middle managers, and members of your labor force. Simply ask them what situations they see daily that could arise to the level of a crisis. Define for them that a crisis is anything that can damage the reputation and revenue of the organization.

Add their observations to your list. Sort their observation by categories.

Next, attempt to identify what the economic impact would be to the organization if each one of these things happened. Use real dollars to calculate real impact for each one of the scenarios you identify.

By the way, once a quarter you should revisit this list and this process because new events will come up that did not exist three months before.

Once your list is completed, call a meeting with executives and let them know what you have learned and share the potential financial consequences of each item on the list.

Often, this list of vulnerabilities can be reduced because leaders will speak up and offer ideas that can eliminate a potential situation or crisis. Great. Hold them accountable to eliminate or mitigate the issue. For example, if malware and fake links in emails is one of your vulnerabilities, your IT team can likely put systems in place to prevent employees from clicking on bad email links. Hence, crisis eliminated or mitigated.

For all that remain, you now need to be prepared to communicate about them in the event any of these particular issues ignites into a crisis.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how to begin managing your communications with a crisis communications plan.

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:

Please Pick Me to be Your Media Trainer

The Biggest Lie in Crisis Communications

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