In reviewing the progress of the current coronavirus pandemic I was thinking about "how to communicate" in a crisis, especially early on in the course of the event. Then I remembered, since it was not that long ago, that I and my former King County Deputy put together a crisis communications workshop for, believe it or not, the city of Kirkland Councilmembers. Kirkland was the epicenter for the COVID-19 outbreak here in the United States.
I'll reprise just a bit of what we shared in that workshop for Kirkland's elected officials. We left them with a couple of handouts, one on Crisis Communications and the other on Outrage Communications. The information below comes from the one pager on Crisis Communications. I think you will see how it fits for this disaster and for how national command authorities initially responded to the epidemic.
Communicating Early in the Disaster
- Acknowledge uncertainty
- Don’t make the mistake of sounding overconfident of the situation
- Replace the word “confident” with “hopeful”
- Speculate on how bad it could be--“It might be really terrible, or it might not be as bad as we originally thought.”
- You can always make it better when facts are known. Start out with the emphasis on the worst-case situation
- Do not over reassure—being alarming is better at this stage
- Tell people something to do to help themselves or the community
