Hill+Knowlton PR: Have a Crisis Preparedness Program in Place
In today’s world of social media and instant news flashes traveling around the world in seconds, what is your company’s plan for when something negative happens? Events flying in the face of your company’s security and reputation? Are you prepared? Do you know how to handle and counteract such a thing?
Hill & Knowlton Strategies launched a crisis preparedness program they have called “flight school” – a fully immersed crisis preparedness program to prepare companies for media turbulence. Designed to school you in all aspects of crisis management. It begins with an online dashboard simulating social and traditional media activity. Other effective components include live callers role-playing as internal contacts, third parties, and reporters. You will have interaction with in-person facilitators and mobile integration via SMS text alerts. All this comes with expert feedback and reporting on your team’s performance.
Why is all of this valuable and applicable to your company’s preparedness? Because the program in fully interactive. Live H+K facilitators help your company’s personnel see how their actions impact a situation’s outcome and development. It’s fast paced. The simulated media dashboard functions as if it were a crisis situation, giving your people invaluable training. And the program is custom designed to fit your company’s specific needs and objectives, and what you wish to achieve in a crisis. Drills are put into place to practice meeting these very objectives.
The dashboard you use is completely safe and secure, private, and is deleted after your company’s use. This keeps all your company’s information used for the drill totally secure. Also, after the full exercise of Flight School is completed, a comprehensive report with overview and evaluation is provided to your team showing them their strengths and where they need to improve. The report includes a full transcript and timeline so personnel learn from their actions and reactions, how they impact, and how to further prepare for the crisis response process.
Think about this preparedness and how it can protect your company from media disaster. It has worked in such fields as higher education, the U.S. military, senior living facilities, oil and energy and others. It has helped protect companies in crises such as oil pipeline breach, safety, data breach, employee misconduct and other challenges.
Every company should have a crisis preparedness plan in place.
