The Importance Of Crisis Communication

The first recommendation discussed in Dr. Sandman’s lecture was for an agency to not over-reassure (Sandman, 2004). Reassurance gives the affected population a sense that things are under control, that there is no need to modify day to day business and that those in charge of the situation are addressing all aspects of the situation. There are positive aspects to reassuring a community. The populace should be calmer in the face of a crisis, exhibit less panic, develop the trust of the community leaders and cause less drain on available resources. Dr. Sandman addresses the negative outcomes that may come through people being overly reassured. The department in charge of crisis communications may over-reassure, creating a public prepositioned

Sandman’s third recommendation for crisis communication is to err on the alarming side. Following in the pattern established by the first two recommendations, the third recommendation serves to focus on maintaining an acceptably elevated awareness and consciousness about the ongoing crisis. Dr. Sandman sums up the logic, as well as the benefit, behind the third recommendation succinctly, saying the damage done for unnecessary alarming is short term and minimal, the damage done by over-reassuring is more damaging, more serious and longer lasting (Sandman, 2004). While the argument for the third recommendation is fairly strong, there is a significant negative impact as well. “Fear mongering is the action of deliberately arousing public fear or alarm about a particular issue: his campaign for re-election was based on fear mongering and deception”. (Oxford Dictionary, 2014) With the rapid proliferation of social media in modern times, fear-mongering is a repeated term, sometimes to cause panic, sometimes to develop conspiracy theories and sometimes to discount government announcements. It is because of this access to information that many times those who bring negative or alarming news to the masses are accused of fear-mongering allegedly for the progression of questionable legislation. Oftentimes, this is not the case, but is a downside to this

Sandman has crisis response practitioners acknowledge opinion diversity when it comes to decision making during response efforts in the sixth recommendation (Sandman, 2004). So the response team demonstrates a united front, the team should not undermine the policy by having people complain about the organizations’ decisions, but instead, support the policy through decisive and applicable action. In public forums and while creating response efforts, the team members must acknowledge other views in presenting a new policy and explain the reasoning for the decision. As a part of this recommendation, it is important to realize that one hundred percent agreement is not necessarily beneficial as a group consensus does not equate reality in predictions. If there is unanimous consensus, it is also likely that reporters and the public will ‘smell a rat’ and try to discredit your organization and