Building a Subject Matter Expert Program
About this course
A practical, self-paced course on finding the people inside your organization who know the work best, preparing them to explain it in public, and running a program that protects them and outlasts any one of them.
During Hurricane Harvey, one of the most trusted voices in Houston wasn't a politician or a police chief. It was a flood control district meteorologist who knew what the water was about to do and could explain it calmly. Every organization has people like that: the fraud investigator who can explain exactly how the latest scam works, the water quality manager who knows why the tap water smells different in August, the paramedic who can describe the four minutes after a 911 call. Most of them have never been asked to speak publicly, and most organizations have no plan for finding, checking or preparing them before a crisis puts them on camera.
This course is that plan. It covers how to map your organization's expertise against the questions you're actually asked, how to assess candidates and carry out the due diligence a reporter would do, and how to prepare experts with key messages, practice sessions and the hard questions that cause most of the damage in interviews. It covers when to put an expert forward and when a senior leader should speak, how to translate technical knowledge into language residents can picture and act on, and how to handle uncertainty honestly.
It also covers the part most programs skip: the legal line between official and personal speech, protecting experts when the attention turns hostile, measuring what the program achieves, and launching a small pilot that can grow into something that lasts. Each lesson is built around real, documented cases, including Hurricane Harvey, the CDC's early COVID-19 and Ebola briefings, and a USGS science column that has run weekly since 1991, and each includes a practical exercise for your own organization. You'll finish with the SME Program Toolkit, which covers identification and vetting, media preparation and the after-interview debrief.
Who This Course Is For:
- Government communicators who want more credible voices than their own and their leadership's
- Communications leads in public safety, public health, utilities and public works whose subjects need expert explanation
- Solo communicators who need a small, manageable way to share the load of speaking to the media
- Communicators who already put experts forward informally and want a safer, more consistent program
Read a sample from this course
The meteorologist most of Houston hadn't heard of
On August 25, 2017, Jeff Lindner walked into the emergency operations center in Houston for what he expected to be a long shift. He was the meteorologist for the Harris County Flood Control District, a technical specialist whose job was to read rainfall and bayou levels and tell decision-makers what the water was about to do. He didn't leave for eight days. At one point he went 60 hours without sleep, and by the end of Hurricane Harvey he had given at least 300 media interviews to local stations and national networks. (ABC13 Houston, 2018)
Somewhere in the middle of that week, Houston decided it trusted him. People started using the hashtag #InLindnerWeTrust. Strangers raised money to send him on vacation, which he turned down under ethics rules and later redirected to families recovering from the flood. (Houston Chronicle, 2017) Asked afterward what he had done, he put it more simply than any communications plan could: "I just did my job. I had information and provided it in a way that people could understand." (ABC13 Houston, 2018)
That sentence is the whole case for this course. Lindner wasn't the county judge, the fire chief or the communications director. He was the person who knew the most about the thing people were frightened of, and he could explain it calmly. In a crisis, that combination is worth more than any title.
Your organization has people like him. They're probably not meteorologists, but there's a fraud investigator who can explain exactly how the grandparent scam works, a water quality manager who knows why the tap water smells different in August, a paramedic who can describe what happens in the four minutes after someone calls 911, and a traffic engineer who knows why that intersection keeps killing people. Most of them have never been asked to speak publicly. Some would be very good at it. This lesson is about finding them, and checking them properly, before a crisis finds them for you.
What you'll learn
Course Curriculum
Full access upon enrollment- 1.The meteorologist most of Houston hadn't heard of
- 2.What a program adds that one good interview doesn't
- 3.The qualities worth looking for
- 4.Where to look
- 5.Checking before anyone goes public
- 6.Try this: a first map of your organization's expertise
- 7.You're not looking for naturals
- 8.Sources & further reading
Course Resources
Available after enrollment
Course details
- Self-paced
- Certificate of completion
- Lifetime access
- 6 lessons · 48 sections
- 1 downloadable resource