We were delighted to welcome Valerie Massey to the Tentacle Zone recently, as she joined us to give last week’s virtual residents talk. Valerie is Head of Community at Consortium9 and her talk was titled Crisis Management 101.

As you can probably tell, Valerie’s talk was all about what to do from a PR and community perspective when things go wrong. As she pointed out, in this situation advanced preparation is the key to success.

Staff should be trained to notify the person in charge of preparing the response at the first sign of trouble. Establish a protocol for who to call and when to call them. To help guide this you should create a policy for what constitutes an emergency.

You should have a generic first response message prepared. The content should be simple and, when it’s ready to go out, it should be released on channels where your audience will see it. Don’t make it too widely available, you want the message to be seen primarily by your audience rather than the wider world.

Once you’ve identified that you’re in the midst of a crisis you should start a timeline immediately. This will be useful later so that you can revise any processes, find areas you can improve and identify staff who may need coaching. 

Nobody likes to think about the worst happening, but Valerie’s talk demonstrated that it’s much better to be prepared for a crisis than to wing it. Thank you to Valerie for her time! If you’re interested in finding out more about Tentacle Zone’s shared workspace and other initiatives, please take a look at our website.