The real Crisis Communication secrets

The most important secrets of Crisis Communication are distributed in all pieces of insight, some of them appear in almost all blog posts only from a different perspective.

The first secret is trust

D*** Thompson, private consultant and former team leader, WHO Pandemic and Outbreak Communication:

Trust is the most important thing. Every communication we make is really part of our pandemic communication, because we’re either building trust or it’s costing us.

Once we finished our work with the outbreak guidelines, I finally was able to read “The Great Influenza” by John M. Barry. In the last two pages of the book, I was really hit hard by what he had to say, because he talked about the public terror that existed in 1918. He said it existed because public officials lied about what was going on, and it became apparent to people who were at risk that they were being lied to, and it was that broken trust that really led to what he calls the terror of 1918. He concluded his book with a plea that “Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, and to try to manipulate no one.” And I hope that’s what we’re doing with our guidelines.

Dori Reissman, Commander, United States Public Health Service, and Senior Medical Advisor, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health:

When we're thinking of behavioral health and emotional readiness in the context of panic, we don't have a ready-made framework of measures and countermeasures that are understood.

That has created some of the problems that we have had in trying to disseminate our message. When we reach out to the different audiences, we find public trust is a big issue. If you don't have the trust, people aren't going to follow what you say to do.

The idea behind the public trust is this: If people are concerned about something and you don't address those concerns, they really can't hear your message.

The next secret is "Neither panic nor deny"

Peter Sandman, Risk Communication Consultant, Princeton, New Jersey:

The problem isn’t panic. The problem is denial. Denial is why panic is rare. We are equipped with a circuit breaker and when we're about to panic, we go into denial instead. Denial is not useful in that people in denial don't take precautions, but it's preferable to panic. People who are panicking do themselves harm. Those who are in denial don't accomplish much, but at least they don't make things any worse. Denial is nature's way of protecting us from the horrible effects of panic and, whereas panic is rare, denial is extremely common.

We need conscious effort on the part of both the sources and on the part of journalists to protect people from denial by seducing them out of denial.

Furthermore its absolutely crucial to understand

Marc Lipsitch, Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health:

Another perspective on the previous point: few good scientists write paper after paper on unrelated observations; rather, they understand why and how their observations are relevant to a larger picture. In my small experience with journalism, that offers a pretty good description of the best journalists as well

There is a lot of information coming out, and the last thing you want to do is contribute to confusion, panic or complacency. One of those three is hard to avoid in any given case; in good news, bad news or mixed news, there can be grounds respectively for complacency, panic, or confusion. Once again this emphasizes the importance of contextualizing information.

In reporting on press releases from drug companies and health authorities, the real question to ask is how the latest finding changes our understanding about an outbreak or about the situation in a given country or the global situation. Are the claims emphasizing the best or the worst case? How uncertain are we? Or, in other words, how strongly does the evidence support our best guess, because to a greater or lesser degree, all science in an outbreak is framed in uncertainty.

Peter Sandman:

People’s perceptions of various risks differ greatly. How will these beliefs about risk play out in a pandemic? And what is the role of officials and journalists as they deal with both people’s strong emotions and emerging facts as they communicate with the public? Peter Sandman, an expert in risk communication explains why risk truly has two elements—hazard and outrage—and why understanding them both is crucial to crisis communication as well as pandemic journalism.

There are plenty of other important factors in Crisis Communication, but i think the qoutes i picked show why these three secrets are in my opinion the most important factors.