PIO ToolkitLighthouse for Public Safety
Intermediate
2.75 hours

Crisis Communication: Planning, Response, and Recovery

Crisis Communication: Planning, Response, and Recovery
$69USD

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About this course

A practical, self-paced course on the whole life of a crisis, from spotting it on the horizon to rebuilding trust afterward, written for the government communicator who will be holding the pen when it happens.

Chaos is more predictable than it feels. Every crisis, whether it lasts an hour or a year, moves through the same phases, and most of what decides how it goes is done before anything happens: the risks you've looked at honestly, the decisions you've already made about who speaks and who approves, the holding statements that are signed off and printed, and the relationships you can call on when your own systems go dark. The communicators who handle crises well aren't the ones who are naturally calm. They're the ones who prepared.

Based on Christine Townsend's book The Frontline Communicator and her decades of crisis work in journalism, UK policing and government communications, this course follows the crisis lifecycle in order. It covers horizon scanning and building a risk matrix you'll actually use; writing a crisis communications plan that works at 2 a.m.; keeping communications running when websites, accounts, phones and people are unavailable; responding quickly without getting the facts wrong; and the recovery phase, where after-action reviews, honest acknowledgment and looking after your team decide how ready you'll be next time.

Each lesson is built around real, documented incidents, including the Lahaina wildfire, the Uvalde school shooting, the Hawaii false missile alert, the Dallas ransomware attack and the Jackson and Flint water crises, and each includes a practical exercise you can do for your own organization. You'll finish with a complete fill-in Crisis Communications Plan Template, with a risk matrix built in, and a pack of Holding Statement Templates for six common incident types that explains what every phrase commits you to.

Who This Course Is For:

  • Government communicators who have been told they own the crisis plan, or who suspect the plan they inherited wouldn't survive a real incident
  • Solo communicators who need a plan, a risk matrix and holding statements that one person can realistically build and maintain
  • Public safety, emergency management and public health communicators who coordinate with partner organizations during incidents
  • Communications leads preparing to run or refresh tabletop exercises and after-action reviews

Read a sample from this course

The fire that was contained

At around 6:30 on the morning of August 8, 2023, a brush fire of about three acres was reported near Lahainaluna Road in Lahaina, on Maui. Crews worked it, and just before 9 a.m. Maui County declared it fully contained. By 3 p.m. it had flared up again and forced the closure of the Lahaina Bypass. (ABC News, 2023) By the end of that day the town was gone, and more than 100 people had died.

A lot went wrong in Lahaina, and the investigations that followed are careful to say that no single failure explains it. The Hawai'i Attorney General's independent analysis found that the lack of pre-event planning and unified command "resulted in insufficient communications that impacted the ability to provide effective evacuation and firefighting operations." (Office of the Governor of Hawai'i, 2024) The Phase One report noted that a National Weather Service forecaster had warned five days earlier that conditions would warrant "a heads up." When cell service failed, residents and visitors could not receive emergency alerts at all, and the outdoor siren network was never sounded. (NPR, 2024)

Look at that day through the phases of a crisis rather than as one long catastrophe. There were indications days in advance. There was a confirmed incident in the early morning. There was a public statement that effectively told people the incident was over. Then the same incident came back, bigger, and moved straight into a phase the public had just been told they were out of.

That's why this course starts with the lifecycle. Once you can see which phase you're in, you know what the public needs from you, what you should and shouldn't be saying, and, just as importantly, what you should have done in the phase before. It won't make a crisis easy. It will make it far less chaotic, because every crisis, whether it lasts an hour or a year, moves through the same structure.

Keep reading — this course continues with 5 more lessons and 47 more sections.

What you'll learn

Recognize the six phases of the crisis lifecycle and adjust what you say, and what you avoid saying, at each transition.
Build a communications risk matrix that scores likelihood and impact and identifies whether each risk would require you to warn, explain, correct or apologize.
Write a crisis communications plan with clear activation levels, named roles and deputies, and approval rules that let you publish in the first minutes.
Coordinate public information with partner organizations using agreed lanes and a confirmation loop.
Draft and pre-approve holding statements for your most likely incidents, knowing exactly what each phrase commits you to.
Plan for continuity when websites, accounts, phones, alert systems or key people are unavailable.
6 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.The fire that was contained
  2. 2.Six phases, one structure
  3. 3.Why Business as Usual carries the most weight
  4. 4.The phases don't always arrive in order
  5. 5.A shared language with your public health partners
  6. 6.Try this: map your last real incident
  7. 7.The lifecycle is a loop, not a line
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
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