“As communicators, we have the ability to save lives. Powerful communications before a crisis and rapid communications during a crisis has the ability to move people out of harm’s way.”  That was the argument made by Gerard Braud in urging everyone at the Heritage Region Conference to pay attention to Crisis Communications Planning. 

Braud, a New Orleans area resident, used Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia Tech crisis to drive home the role communicators can play in saving lives.  In New Orleans, for example, the mayor delayed ordering an evacuation of the city to check with the lawyers about the liability  involved.  At Virginia Tech, no one talked until 10 minutes after the second shooting and 29 were dead.   

Said Braud, checking with the lawyers was something that should have been done on the mayor’s first day on the job.  At Virginia Tech, the university knew that e-mail could only reach 8,000 on-campus students, only a portion of the impacted community.

There is, he said, a big difference between an emergency operations plan and a Crisis Communication Plan — and if you’re in communications, you’re in charge of crisis communications. What does that mean? You need to plan ahead. Because you must be communicating with all your audiences within 1 hour. If you do not, you risk being seen as hiding the truth, being incompetent, or both.

A crisis communications plan is your lifeline. It contains pre-written, pre-approved key messages for all audiences to eliminate the lost time spent trying to formulate news releases when adrenaline is flowing and emotions are running high. It tells you when to use your text messaging, e-mails, web postings, other tools – and what to do when the power is out. 

A crisis communication plan tells you what to do. It needs to be an action plan, not a policy manual. It needs to be in binders and simple enough for anyone to execute, and you need to have it with you at all times (keep a copy at home, in the car and when you when you travel).

Gerard made a very compelling case; made the notion of preparing a crisis communication plan practical. Given the world we live in, we should probably take his warnings seriously. He has some free resources at http://www.schoolcrisisplan.com/resources.html