So now you have an updated and strengthened Crisis Plan.
You went through a rigorous exercise of building crisis responses to all the new and emerging risks – from Presidential tweets through to highly politicized issues around gender, sexual orientation, race and workplace culture.
You are satisfied that your processes and systems are capable of matching the speed by which digital and social media drives a crisis.
You’ve identified stakeholders and influencers and the NGOs who matter.
You’ve got your crisis team in place and all trained.
You are hoping for the best, but planning for the worst.
So where does all this great crisis planning material get stored until you need it?
- No-one thinks the old ring binder gathering dust on a shelf in the office is the right way to go anymore.
- Individual members of the crisis team could retain it on their laptop hard drives. But how could you be sure people have the up-to-date version when the crisis strikes.
- So maybe the plan’s location should be on the organization’s intranet. But that raises questions about easy it would be to access the IT network should the worst happen out of regular office hours (in my experience, crises really do break on holiday weekends!).
There is only one effective answer. And it’s right there in front of you.
Your smartphone.
When the worst happens and a crisis breaks, you need to move extremely fast to gain control of the situation.
No traditional way of storing or accessing a crisis plan is very effective in this digital information age.
Admittedly we at RockDove Solutions are biased – we created the In Case of Crisis mobile app which is already used by organizations such as Fluidmaster, Philips Lifeline and more.
As our clients who are already using a mobile crisis app will tell you - any organization that really wants state of the art crisis defenses (which is everyone, really) has to use the best technology available.
And that means a mobile app.
Effective speed of response is created by having your crisis plan on a smartphone app to enable immediate access to the plan and activation of the crisis response team.
Find out more about the author by visiting www.thehatcliffegroup.com
