Many organization are looking for ways to better prepare themselves to address future crises. S360’s team has created crisis communications plans for a clients from a variety of backgrounds. These plans provide a blueprint for your organization to follow when the next crisis unfolds.

To create this plan, S360 will first conduct an audit of your organization’s current crisis communications preparedness, establishing a baseline and understanding internal processes, strengths and areas of opportunity.

In partnership with your organizations leadership and communications team, we will produce a fully developed plan that prepares key staff to effectively and nimbly manage crisis communications, support your organization in responding in a unified, professional manner that reinforces its mission, vision and values, protect your reputation through consistent and transparent internal and external communications, manage the distribution of critical information to relevant stakeholders ( including employees, media and the public) and identify potential spokespeople.

To achieve these objectives, the plan will develop protocols and procedures to guide you through a crisis situation, and will include sample materials including holding statements aimed at responding to the most likely reputation threat scenarios.

Once your organization has a crisis communications plan in place, it is often helpful to provide an opportunity to test it out before an actual crisis takes place. Using the vulnerability assessment developed while creating the plan, S360 will create a crisis communications scenario and then conduct a real-time simulation involving key members of your team. During the day-long training, staff members will have to deal with a public facing crisis, including message development, press release drafting, social media management and live interviews. S360 team members will provide updates to the crisis throughout the day, testing your team’s ability to adjust approaches to best succeed in addressing the crisis. Once the exercise is complete, S360 will develop a detailed debrief document on the simulation. This document will provide constructive feedback that you can use to strengthen its crisis response abilities.

The key to an organization’s successful messaging is knowing how to effectively and clearly communicate with members of the media across multiple platforms. Strategies 360 draws on the extensive media background of its company-wide communications team to provide training that is essential to promoting your organization as well as responding to any crisis that should arise. Working with our team, you will identify potential spokespersons within your organization that will be part of any media outreach or response. As part of the media training, your organization will learn:

• Knowing how best to respond to a media inquiry
• How to conduct yourself during an interview with the media
• The best practices for responding to the media regarding a crisis that might involve your organization or the industry at large
• Knowing when or when not to engage with the media

Our media training includes:

• Introduction to how news media, journalists work
• General communications, adjusting message to audience
• Identifying potential stories or crises hospital systems could be involved in
• Step by step do’s and don’ts on responding to a crisis
• One-on-one practice sessions on how to respond to a crisis
• Real-time feedback and critiques for trainees