Risk/Crisis Communication

Risk/Crisis Communication Chapters 11 and 12

For an excellent and thorough review of Chapters 11 and 12, check out Giselle's post. I thought she did an excellent job. As always there are a number of things that I liked and a few things I thought the author glanced over.

Chapter 11 could definitely have been more helpful. It did an excellent job covering the necessary elements of setting a communication schedule. It missed covering techniques and ways that one could actually do it. While a lot of it seems like common sense, I think it’s important to note a few techniques for setting a schedule with deadlines that are attainable.

There are two ways to decide on a timeframe: Start from day 1 of the proposed preparations and move forward, or start with the final outcome you want to achieve and then move backwards. If you cannot have everyone (or their representative) that is involved in the schedule present at its creation, make sure to run it by them before it is okayed. This is where the signature sheet comes into play. It needs to be considerate of all for whom the schedule pertains.

Remember that there are always people involved, people aren’t perfect and they get distracted or are busy. While it’s nice to be able to rely on others, sometimes things get lost in the wash of whatever it is you’re communicating. For this reason, it is important to consider two things: One is to allow an extra day or two for every deadline. You need to build in wiggle room. The second is that, as the creator of the schedule it is your job that everyone sticks to it that needs to, or make it someone’s job to follow up with everyone involved with the schedule.

I thought the “Ongoing Activities” section (p. 173-4) was very important to highlight. There is nothing worse than competing for space when there are other huge events in the media, especially if you are attempting to communicate risk or information about a crisis. There is an excellent list of questions that as risk/crisis communicators we will need to answer on page 174.

I will reiterate them, b/c they are important:

“What happened?”

“How dangerous is it?”

“How could it affect me or the people or things I care about?”

“What can I do?”

My question to the class is: Are there any other questions that generally need to be taken into consideration? Obviously these will change and get more complex depending upon audience, but are there any other needs that information can more or less fulfill?

Finally, for Ch. 11, I wanted to point out that we are all living the dream according to the poor chap who wanted to get his house tested for radon gases. Following Coles’ 1993 “Birth of a Notion” perspective (See Giselle’s post), we are living in the state of someone’s wishful thinking: “’Maybe I could just sell the house and move to Florida’” (p.176). He was obviously worried and not logical, for he may end up having the new house he purchased in this state tested for structural soundness by a hurricane.

On to Ch. 12: Another excellent chapter. Very informative and it is basically a rehashing of how to write up a communications plan. Again, full of good advice and this time they gave some very useful examples. The storyboarding was great, but I was most impressed with the “onion diagram” developed by James Creighton on p. 188. I thought it was an excellent visual representation of how and where audiences fall in relation to the organization and the presenting risk/crisis. They can then be labeled according to Dozier, et al.’s (1995) audience assessment measures. As the publics in the onion diagram get closer to the center, they move up the list from nonpublic to active public.

Something the authors briefly touched on was SWOT analyses and essentially co-orientation theory for determining a public’s feelings towards an organization. As an audience analysis, co-orientation should definitely be done with the public and the organization to use as a starting point for developing communication materials. However, it can be adapted for risk and crisis communication, simply by putting the risk in column A instead of the organization. This way the audience’s understandings of the risk can be co-oriented against the organizations perception of the risk and communications materials can be further developed to directly meet the needs of the audience. See McLeod, J.M. & Chaffee, S.H. (1973). Interpersonal Approaches to Communication Research. The American Behavioral Scientist, 16 (4) pp. 469-499