Prepare your school crisis communication plan before you need it

Five steps to ensure your communications are ready when crisis hits

A crisis event can shatter or enhance a school’s reputation. Power outages, burst pipes, data breaches, disgruntled parents talking to the press and safeguarding issues are just a few examples of concerns that schools have to deal with. When these events occur, the focus is necessarily on resolving the immediate problem and ensuring that everyone is safe. While each event is unique and comes with its own challenges, communication to support a school’s reputation, and stay ahead of gossip and rumours, can be planned, regardless of the issue. Here are five steps any school can take to ensure that a crisis communication approach is ready when it is needed.

Ensure somebody is in charge of communication

Having a single point of contact who is responsible and has oversight of all communications going in and out of the school reduces the stress for everybody else. This person would have gone through practice scenarios to ensure both they are prepared, and the approach is robust. They don’t have to write or send every message, but they do keep track of them and ensure they are coordinated.

Schedule and follow a communication timeline

This may be a decision-based flowchart or a planned sequence of events that provides a framework for who hears what by when from who. It’s helpful as it ensures, in advance, which key audiences need to be informed, eliminating the need to have to think of them when under pressure during a crisis. 

Create message templates that can be quickly edited

Having a large part of crisis messages written in advance can significantly speed up the process of getting messages out. This also allows a pre-determined level of consistency and core messages to be built into every message, while enabling school leaders to add specific details related to each crisis as required.

Agree key messages and spokespeople

This would be a brief document containing the critical messages that all staff are allowed to share with parents and students. School team members who are authorised to talk with the media on behalf of the school would use this document to do so, ensuring they do not speculate, give personal views of the situation or embellish facts.

Give parents a point of contact

There will inevitably be questions during any crisis, so it is best to give people a specific point of contact who has the capacity and knowledge to respond appropriately. Any specific contact numbers, email addresses or social media sites relating to the crisis should be regularly monitored and queries responded to in a timely and appropriate manner.

While no school can ever be fully prepared for a crisis, there are lots of actions that can be taken in advance to reduce the stress on the day when something happens. There is more information related to communicating through a crisis in our book ‘How to Build Communication Success in Your School’ and at https://fit2communicate.com/schools-overview.