Issues & Crisis Communications

Most crisis issues are not unique, and they can be prepared for through effective planning. We partner with you to define the most effective crisis communications approaches, including outlining key issues for the business and industry, and then we test those issues to determine where points of vulnerability might exist for your enterprise.

Next, we establish a crisis response team that identifies key roles and responsibilities across the organization — accounting for organizational structures and ways of working.

The result is a living, breathing crisis playbook that is consistently updated to account for new issues, threats, and changes to the business.

What you say when faced with a crisis is as important — and sometimes more so — than what you fail to say. As part of advanced planning, we work with you to draft holding statements, messaging, and other needed communications for various scenarios.

As a result, when the time comes, we can move quickly with pre-approved language and approaches that won’t require much additional review.

And where the issue is significant enough, we can test the effectiveness of your messaging with real-time stakeholder research — allowing us to make adjustments that better meet stakeholder expectations and organizational objectives.

How do you know if you’re ready to manage a crisis? The answer is simple: prepare.

Working with your communications team and other internal stakeholders, we create a series of customized training sessions, built on our mutual analysis of the issues landscape and audience insights, to allow your leadership team to practice (and be critiqued on) how well they respond to an issue.

These sessions are held in a controlled environment, but we work to make them feel as real as possible so that we can help perfect the company’s crisis planning and provide additional training for the executive team.

A crisis can feel like it came out of nowhere, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and underprepared. We will be right there with you to help turn concern into context — calmly and effectively, with data-driven insights that will help build confidence with your internal stakeholders while enhancing trust with external audiences.

When crisis strikes, we help you operationalize your crisis playbook and coordinate messages across all channels — from press releases to social media, and beyond.

Online reviews are the new word of mouth, the digital era's currency of trust. We help you navigate the negative and improve your average rating to bolster your credibility with current and prospective customers.

Our team works with you to implement the right review management software to aggregate, analyze, and respond to reviews across locations and review sites. We define your review response and escalation protocol and create a strategy for proactive review requests — often powered by AI and automation.

Your team can outsource ongoing review management to ours, or we can turn it over to yours with all the resources you need to be successful.