Sometimes we see the crisis looming. Sometimes it just hits us out of nowhere. Either way, that crisis is coming to all organsiations at some point. How damaging it becomes to our license to operate depends upon how well prepared we are, how we respond in the moment and how we learn from it afterwards.
“We’ve been successfully linking up big data sources with national clinical data sets in order to refine clinical pathways across a number of national health systems for years. We recently entered into discussion with a national genomic databank and all hell broke loose. We’re a small organisation staffed largely by data analysts and clinicians who are dedicated to improving patients’ health outcomes. We were caught completely by surprise when the protests and media assault started, not to mention the social media intrusion and even doxing of our employees…”
The best way to respond to a crisis is by being well prepared for it. It is probable that as a science company you are deeply engaged in the sensitive areas of health, personal data and, maybe even human genomics. Public, professional and regulator confidence gives you your very license to operate. It is wise to prepare your organisation to mitigate any risk of that confidence being undermined.
We can help you help your organisation to prepare for and respond to crises by providing:
- Preparation, we can help you build core communications plans that can be adapted to meet the requirements of a specific crisis, and work with your teams to help them build their response capabilities
- Training, working with media trainers, message trainers and parliamentary experts to prepare senior leaders for public, media, parliamentary and employee scrutiny. We recommend that you don’t wait for a crisis to hit, but offer training to your leadership team as part of their ongoing development
- Strategic counsel, we have experience working with all levels of seniority within an organisation and can support at any stage of a planning or response process
- Responsiveness, we can be by your side at every stage of the situation and will stay with you until it resolves. We can provide counsel, additional capacity, expertise across all channels, ‘third party’ challenge, outreach and in-situation planning
- Post-hoc learning, identify priorities and next steps immediately following a crisis. Assess strengths and weaknesses of the response and put into place organisational development measures
Our crisis communications expertise lies in:
- Message development, applicable across multiple stakeholders and channels; co-developed with senior leaders, global and in-county communications teams
- Media management, proactive and reactive, planned and unplanned. Setting up press offices
- Parliamentary scrutiny, response to parliamentary inquiries, development of select committee submissions and preparation of senior leaders to give oral evidence to select committees
- Employee engagement, consistent messaging between internal and external stakeholders and a transparent, open approach to your people about what’s happening and how they can help
If you want to do more to enhance your crisis communications planning and resilience, or if you’re about to experience an unforeseen situation that you need support in managing then let us know a little bit more about your needs below (or call us directly on 07775 676 162 if the matter is urgent):