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How to Create a Crisis

Communication Plan

Francis Willett, Director of Everbridge Professional Services

Bill Scerra, Everbridge Learning Officer, World Wide Best Practices

About Everbridge

Everbridge provides industry-leading interactive communication and mass notification

solutions to organizations in all major industries and government sectors. Everbridge

solutions increase connectivity to key audiences, automate communication processes, and

integrate recipient feedback, external data feeds, and social media in a single

communications console. Ultimately, these solutions provide the insight and infrastructure

that help clients save lives, manage critical activities and improve the efficiency of daily

operations.

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Locations North America: Los Angeles, Boston; Europe & Asia

Business Focus On-demand delivery of incident communication and management solutions

Delivery Scale Over 100 million+ messages per year

Infrastructure Elastic infrastructure model supported by multiple top-tier data centers

and dual operations centers, 100% redundancy

Customers 1,000+ organizations; used in 106 countries, serving 30m+ individuals

Download the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report: www.everbridge.com/gartner

Agenda

Part 1: Presentation • What is a communication plan and how do they help in a crisis?

• How does a mass communication solution fit into that plan?

• Where can you get help creating a communication plan?

• What are the stages of a crisis?

• How do we communicate during the stages of a crisis?

• How do we build our communication plan to handle the stages of a crisis?

Part 2: Q&A

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Are you on Twitter? Follow us at @everbridge and

tweet insights with your friends during the webinar

using the hashtag #everbridge OR follow our speaker

Francis S. Willett @FSWEverbridge

Agenda

LinkedIn Member? Join our LinkedIn Everbridge

Incident Management Professionals Group

Use the Q&A

function to

submit your

questions.

Q&A

5

Note:

Presentation slides are available on our Blog

at blog.everbridge.com

Speakers

6

Bill Scerra

Learning Officer, World Wide Best Practices, Everbridge

Francis S. Willett

Director of Professional Services, Everbridge

A Crisis Communication Plan

• It is a critical activity to plan and build a crisis communication plan

• The dangers of the failure to plan could cost money, lives, and reputations

• The experiences of 9/11 and Katrina demonstrated the danger of a failure to plan

• We will focus on a crisis that impacts your stakeholders rather than a crisis seen as

caused by your organization

• Hurricane Katrina versus BP Oil Spill

• Steps we discuss can be used in both cases but we aren’t focusing on media

communications, investigations, and news releases.

―By failing to prepare,

you are preparing to fail.‖

- Benjamin Franklin

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What Should a Communication Plan Cover (1)?

A plan covers, describes several areas that need to be covered:

• Clear understanding of the incident at hand

• There is a fire in the building

• There is severe weather in the area

• Identify the individuals or groups you need to communicate with

• Unified command

• Employees

• Residents and businesses

– Language or cultural issues

• Communicate information to incident management/response teams

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What Should a Communication Plan Cover (2)?

A plan covers, describes several areas that need to be covered:

• Identify different methods of communication available

• Automated

• Manual

• Ability for recipients to provide feedback

• Follow message best practices to help prevent sending misleading or bad notifications

• Manage demands for information by all involved people

• Press conference areas

• New media

• Social media platform

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Social Media and Your Communication Plan (1)

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• How do you integrate social media in your Communication

Plan?

• Use multiple social media platforms

•Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare,

MySpace, Mixi are most commonly used

• Monitor and post daily with fresh content

•Whether posting yourself or taking advantage of

automated feeds from your website content:

Keep your social media pages active

• Make your social media page social —

•Let people post to your Facebook wall and foster

two-way dialog and interact!

•Re-tweeting/Re-Posting content that you approve

breeds collaboration. Trust Me/Trust You

Actual Twitter Feeds during week of Aug 27, 2012 - @FSWEverbridge, @CraifatFEMA, @NOLAReady, @RedCross

and http://www.govtech.com/e-government/7-Tips-for-Better-Social-Media-Engagement.html

Social Media and Your Communication Plan (2)

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• Pilot first, policy later

• Once you have permission to start a social media page, roll with it on a trial basis

• Develop policies later, after you see what works best

• Take negativity in stride

• Negative comments will happen

• Be patient and use it as an opportunity to present facts and improve services

• Use Social Media to enforce a unified message and control new media

• New media can take a poor tweet and run with it, just like a poorly recorded voice

message

Actual Twitter Feeds during week of Aug 27, 2012 - @FSWEverbridge, @CraifatFEMA, @NOLAReady, @RedCross

and http://www.govtech.com/e-government/7-Tips-for-Better-Social-Media-Engagement.html

Social Media and Your Communication Plan (3)

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• Assemble key players

• When working on policies, make that your corporate, city, or county’s legal

advisors/attorney are involved, along with the key decision-makers.

• Revisit security settings — Security settings can change often. Make it a point to

regularly check them.

• Unfortunately, Hackers will often hit your social media sites when in the middle of

an emergency.

• Build brand awareness – Promoting your a communication brand across

ALL Communication Platforms, including Social Media, e.g. – www.ctalert.gov, @CTALERT, ctalert@ct.gov

– NOLAReady, @nolaready, ready.nola.gov

Actual Twitter Feeds during week of Aug 27, 2012 - @FSWEverbridge, @CraifatFEMA, @NOLAReady, @RedCross

and http://www.govtech.com/e-government/7-Tips-for-Better-Social-Media-Engagement.html

Social Media and Your Communication Plan (4)

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• Multimedia is a must

• Use photos and videos, as much as possible, to ensure your social media

content is dynamic

• Finally, your mass notification system should help by

• Facilitating your unified message delivery to all modes of communication

• Filtering social media based on your needs, automatically sending notification

when certain thresholds and posts are received

• Providing you with the ability to quickly respond and communicate to your

recipients when it’s needed or with you want them to be informed.

Where can I Find More Information?

• There is a science in planning for a crisis, creating effective messages, and

communication planning

• Everbridge Professional Services can help you develop your plan

• Dr. Chandler’s Book Emergency Notifications provides an excellent in-depth study

of the wide range of needs

• FEMA and CDC also have excellent on-line materials and recommendations.

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Professional

Services

What to Look for in a Consultant

• What are the credentials of an Emergency Notification consultant that you should

look for?

• What areas of Certification should you look for?

• Emergency Management Director (EMD)

• Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

• International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM)

• Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP)

• What kind of experience should they have?

• Volunteer EMD for a Durham, CT (8 years)

• Experience in implementing software and services to customers (20 years)

• EMS Operations Chief for New Hampshire Motor Speedway (NASCAR events)

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What Consulting Services are Available?

• What help could they offer beside helping you build your communication plan?

A few options using Everbridge Professional Services as an example:

Create Your Message Content

• Provides a framework for effective messaging

• Pre-populate your ENS system with message templates for live use

Best Practice Implementation

• Present the best practice options for your specific environment

• Help you implement the best practices in your environment

Reporting

• How to report with real-time, broadcast, and Ad-Hoc requirements

• How to analyze your effectiveness after the event

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Message Mapping

• Creating the messages is a very important component of crisis communication

planning

• We have a whitepaper, Message Mapping – Best Practices that we can send to

anyone wanting a copy

• Covers how to build an effective, clear, and targeted message during an incident

• Provides examples to use as guides

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What Will We Do?

• Our focus is ―what are the basic components of your communication plan for

notifications?‖

• The background model that we will use is the six stages of a crisis

Start Notifications Finish

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1. Warning

2. Risk

Assessment

3. Response 4. Management

5. Resolution 6. Recovery

Six Stages of the Incident Lifecycle

• A crisis has six stages

• It is critical to consider every stage of the crisis while

building a crisis communication plan

1. Warning

2. Risk Assessment

3. Response

4. Management

5. Resolution

6. Recovery

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1. Warning

2. Risk Assessment

3. Response

4. Management

5. Resolution

6. Recovery

Warning Stage

• The warning phase can differ depending on the

incident

• A hurricane could have a recommendations and

precautions sent out days before the incident

• A fire could have smoke seen or smelled and a

notification sent

• A power outage may have no warning phase at all

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1. Warning

2. Risk Assessment

3. Response

4. Management

5. Resolution

6. Recovery

Risk Assessment Stage

• During Risk Assessment information and the crisis

management team are gathered

• The notifications are mainly designed to assemble and

apprise the team

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1. Warning

2. Risk Assessment

3. Response

4. Management

5. Resolution

6. Recovery

Response Stage

• After the emergency plan is activated, crisis team

members send notifications to the key recipients

• The recipients depend on the incident and notification

entity

• For example, the recipients could be employees,

hospital staff, students, or community residents

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1. Warning

2. Risk Assessment

3. Response

4. Management

5. Resolution

6. Recovery

Management Stage

• The management stage follows the initial responses

and team activations

• The crisis is being assessed and progress toward a

resolution is being made

• This stage will have frequent updates, suggested

actions, response corrections, and conferences

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1. Warning

2. Risk Assessment

3. Response

4. Management

5. Resolution

6. Recovery

Resolution Stage

• Once the crisis is resolved, notifications can be sent to

help get the recipients back to normal

• This can include ―all clear‖ messages and messages to

assure the recipients that everything is under control

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1. Warning

2. Risk Assessment

3. Response

4. Management

5. Resolution

6. Recovery

Recovery Stage

• During the recovery stage, the focus is on healing and

getting back to normal

• Post-crisis assessment, a return to pre-crisis policies

and activities, and repair initiatives are sent in

notifications.

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1. Warning

2. Risk

Assessment

3. Response 4. Management

5. Resolution 6. Recovery

Six Stages in a Corporate Fire Incident

• We will walk through the notifications in a incident involving a

reported corporate building fire

• The fire is at the Gotham Corporate Center

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Warning Stage

Day 1 - 8:30 pm Initial Warning Notification

―Second Alarm Fire has been reported at the Gotham Corporate

Offices. Corporate Offices may be temporarily closed. Our Data

Center is still operational. We will inform with additional notifications

as information become available.‖

Day 1 - 8:45 pm Conference Call Initiation

A Conference Call is generated to activate the Emergency Operations

Center (EOC) and Crisis Management Team (CMT).

An update is sent to the EOC and CMT covering the ongoing incident,

mandatory building evacuation, and closure of affected areas.

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Risk Assessment Stage

Day 1 - 9:30 pm

Notification to activate Business Continuity Planner

(BCP) teams requesting them to report their status

to Crisis Management Team (CMT).

Day 1 - 9:45 pm

A polling request is sent to assess if any employees

are in danger.

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Response Stage

Day 2 - 5:00 am

Gotham Center Corporate Office notifications are sent.

Employees are instructed to remain out of area as instructed by

local authorities.

Corporate Office is closed until further notice.

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Management Stage

Day 2 - 9:30 am

Gotham Center Corporate Office notifications are sent.

―Update – Due to fire, corporate Office is still closed until further notice.

All company services are operational. Continue to telecommute from

home as your department requires.‖

Day 2 - 5:00 pm

Gotham Center Corporate Office notifications are sent again.

―Update – Due to fire, Corporate Office is closed until further notice.

The Suburban Office is operational for those departments effected by the

fire. All company services are operational.‖

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Resolution Stage

Day 3 - 5:00 am

All Gotham Center Corporate Office notifications sent.

―Update send – Corporate Offices not affected by the fire are

now open.

The Sea Crest Office is now operational for those departments

affected by the fire.

All company services are operational. CMT and BCP are still

operational.‖

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Recovery Stage

Day 3 - 9:00 am

Company Notification from CEO updating all

employees of the fire incident at the Gotham Center

Corporate Offices.

Notification ask that those who are still experiencing

any workplace service disruption are to contact the

CMT at 555-555-5500.

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What is in the Plan to Handle the Stages?

• List all of the people (recipients) that you will need to notify

• Who and where are they?

• Proximity to the crisis

• Name and Address

• What are their roles?

• Crisis Team Members

• Management or Administration

• Employees or citizens

• Who is in charge of each area?

• How will you reach them?

• Think Multimodal – communication systems fail

• Target the person where they are located – not just their

device

• What type of message should they receive

• Plan to communicate ―early and often‖

• Give them a way to respond and/or confirm

33

34

Questions?

Image from http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/rmas/ask_question.html, Risk Management & Audit Services, Harvard University

Use the Q&A

function to

submit your

questions.

Note:

Presentation slides are available on our Blog

at blog.everbridge.com

Contact Information & Free Trial

Thank you for joining us today!

Bill Scerra

Bill.Scerra@everbridge.com

Francis Willett

Francis.Willett@everbridge.com

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Appendix: During the Warning Stage

• Who needs to be notified that an incident could or will be

occurring?

• Plan for the various scenarios that could occur

• Fire, Flood, Chemical Spill, STEMI Alert, etc.

• Community fire, health, or police groups?

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During the Warning Stage

• Your notification templates should be detailed and

• Cover regional disasters like hurricanes, tornados, or

earthquakes.

• Cover fires, criminal, and health related incidents

• Cover your specific incidents, e.g. a hospital child abduction

or mass casualty

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During the Warning Stage

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• What types of messages will you send?

• Templates to cover initial notifications

• Determine how and in what order you will send

messages to the recipients

• Follow unified message best practice – single

message script for all devices or communication

channels

• Cell Phone -> Email -> SMS -> etc.

During the Warning Stage

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• What types of messages will you send?

• Templates to cover initial notifications

• Determine how and in what order you will send

messages to the recipients

• Will you require confirmation or the recipient to

provide more information ?

• Will the messages be sent to enrolled users or

geographically to 911 lists?

Risk Assessment Stage

• Who leads the crisis management teams?

• Where do the teams meet?

• How do you set up conference calls?

• How do you get information from your recipients?

• Who coordinates the communication between teams?

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Response Stage

• What are the planned notification to your recipients

during the response stage?

• What action do you want them to take?

• Where can they go?

• How will you help those in distress?

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Management Stage

How will you manage the scenario?

Who is in charge and sends the notifications?

What will the recipients and responders need to be told?

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Resolution Stage

• Who has the authority to issue the ―all clear‖?

• For each situation when can an ―all clear‖ be issued?

• Who should received the all clear messages?

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Recovery Stage

Who coordinates the clean up activities?

When are the teams set back to on-call rather than active?

Who will assess the effectiveness of the crisis management

activities?

44

45

Questions?

Image from http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/rmas/ask_question.html, Risk Management & Audit Services, Harvard University