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Crisis Communication Strategies: prepare, respond and recover effectively in unpredictable and urgent situations

by Geoffrey Hart

Amanda Coleman. 2023. 2nd ed. KoganPage. [ISBN 978-1-3986-0941-9. 230 pages, including index. US$34.99 (softcover).]

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2024. Book review: Crisis Communication Strategies: Prepare, respond and recover effectively in unpredictable and urgent situations. Technical Communication 71(1):91-92.

Crises, by definition, happen without warning. Communicators must therefore respond without the luxury of enough time to consider their responses. In the second edition of Crisis Communication Strategies: prepare, respond and recover effectively in unpredictable and urgent situations, Amanda Coleman provides the tools you’ll need to plan for and successfully respond to crises. The book’s packed with strategies for developing and implementing communication plans that work. The key? Coleman repeatedly emphasizes the importance of understanding stakeholder needs by means of audience analysis, of developing stakeholder-specific plans, of planning and testing to confirm that the plans work, and of frequently reviewing plans to account for changes in an organization’s operating context.

Most technical communicators assume that communication is emotionally neutral, with clarity and concision—skills we need to learn and use even outside a crisis—more important than any emotional context. Coleman sets her book apart from most communication books you’ve read by repeatedly emphasizing the audience’s physical and emotional needs. Crises are emotionally and physically exhausting, both inside the organization that must respond and out. Communication can’t succeed without mitigating these problems by first gaining the audience’s trust through judiciously chosen words accompanied by actions consistent with the words.

Crisis communicators must continuously acknowledge the audience’s feelings and fears to provide reassurance. They must listen to and respect the audience’s emotional responses. Unlike most technical communication, crisis communication can’t be one-way; it must therefore change from dictation to dialogue. Many organizations think that online discussion forums can replace personalized support from organization representatives. During a crisis, they can’t.

The best-laid plans fail when they become dusty binders, ignored on someone’s shelf. Instead, they must become living parts of the organization’s daily processes so that everyone understands their role in a crisis and can immediately act or support the actions of others. Many scrupulous response plans were prepared after the SARS and MERS pandemics; people died during the Covid-19 pandemic because few of these plans were followed. They’d been forgotten.

There are, inevitably, omissions and oddities: Coleman doesn’t start by defining “crisis” and listing typical crisis types, from physical (explosions) to “soft” (stolen confidential data), which remain implicit until later in the book. This makes it difficult for readers to build their own list of scenarios they must plan for. Adding a chapter on vulnerability analysis would solve this problem. Although Coleman mentions the importance of decision-support tools (checklists, flowcharts) and of support, the book has no Web page that links to key traditional and new social media, including discussion forums and groups of communication colleagues, nor links to important tools such as sample plans, downloadable templates, and software links (e.g., to reputation monitors).

Criticisms notwithstanding, Crisis Communication Strategies is a great introductory textbook, and even non-crisis communicators will learn much from this book.