The future of communications runs on trust. Here’s what crisis leaders say matters now.
Your everyday comms determine how smooth your crisis response will be.
A crisis today is faster and less predictable than ever before. AI can create a convincing fake in seconds or an employee complaint can jump from Reddit to mainstream news before a company knows it’s happening. This isn’t going to slow down.
The communicators who will be most effective in the next era of crisis response will need strong relationships with their audiences and systems that allow them to make decisions before misinformation or speculation fills the gap.
In other words, the response itself is only one part of crisis communications.
Danielle Grossman, director of strategic communications for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, sees one thing becoming more valuable as information gets harder to control: credibility.
“Trust is a brand or organization’s strongest form of currency,” Grossman said. “Even as the internet, AI and misinformation move faster than we can fathom, the fundamentals haven’t changed.”
That means reputation building and crisis preparation go hand-in-hand.
Build trust before a crisis hits
Communicators should be building relationships with employees, customers, reporters and communities when there isn’t a problem to solve, Grossman said.
“Earn trust when things are calm, so you have something to lean on when they’re not (calm),” Grossman said.
Caitlin Leopold, senior director of external communications at Honeywell, made a similar argument.
“Trust in a crisis is not built in the moment,” she told PR Daily. “It is drawn down from what you’ve built over time.”
This is especially important in an environment where organizations find themselves competing with false or misleading versions of events. A correction only works if people trust the organization issuing it, she said.
The point is your everyday communications are part of your crisis plan. Establishing trust early is a critical part of that.
Know your escalation ladder
Traditional crisis preparation centers on holding statements, talking points, media responses and templates.
Those are still critical tools and you need them. But organizations also need to know how to quickly escalate a plan.
Early on, think of:
- Who determines whether something has reached crisis level?
- Who needs to be called?
- Who has approval authority?
- What happens when that person isn’t available?
“When these pieces are all in place, your speed is going to become a byproduct of preparation, not panic,” Leopold said.
Give communicators permission to say no
While speed can protect an organization from a false narrative, it can also create another problem if the company acts before it understands all the pieces.
Leopold said communicators sometimes need to say “no to moving too fast without facts” and “no to language that might feel good internally but isn’t going to hold a candle externally.”
Naomi Goldman, founder of NLG Communications, puts this problem more plainly.
“People don’t have to be accurate. They just want to be first. I have to talk to people a lot about not answering the hypotheticals or not speculating. You are the messenger. You’re not necessarily going to answer every single question. Your job is to make sure that you’re communicating the most important messages at the right time to the right audiences.”
That makes judgment more important as technology accelerates the information cycle.
Know enough about the business to challenge it
The other major shift is where crisis communicators sit inside an organization.
If you’re coming into the process only when someone asks for a statement, it may already be too late to prevent reputational damage.
A crisis communicator needs to understand the business and bring valuable insights to the decision-making process, Goldman said.
“Being a good strategist and communications partner, you have to be opinionated,” she said. “I am not the person to hire if you want the yes person.”
Communicators need the ability to identify consequences that other departments may miss and challenge decisions before they become communications problems, which is a very different role from reviewing a statement after a decision has already been made, she said.
As communicators prepare for the year ahead, Grossman says all these challenges boil down to how solid an organization’s foundation is.
“Build a strong foundation before a crisis hits,” Grossman said. Because once the crisis arrives, you’re working with whatever foundation you already have.
