Sherita Coffelt of Los Angeles's Metrolink presented during the May 2017 TCU Nonprofit Communicators Conference.

1. Crisis Communications
Non-profit Communicators Conference
May 19, 2017

2. The discussion
 Introduction
 What is a crisis?
 BEFORE
 DURING
 AFTER

3. Roll-call
You
 Communicators?
 Administration?
 HR?
 Marketing?
 Government?
 Non-profit?
 Anyone else?
Me
 Native Texan
 UNT grad (Go Mean Green!)
 Spokesperson (PIO) at North Texas
Tollway Authority
 Director of Public Affairs at Metrolink in
Los Angeles
 Started working on crises after college
 Oil spills
 Electric outages
 Layoffs

4. What is a crisis?
Natural disasters
High profile company
issue (external)
Terrorism
Employee issue

5. BEFORE – Take advantage of this time to
improve performance when a crisis occurs
Planning
• Incident response plan (agency)
• Crisis communications plan
• Holding statements
• Identify roles and responsibilities
• Identify back-up for each role
• SOPs for each role
• Where you report
• Policies (approval policy, media
policy, social media policy)
Training
• Intra-agency
• Interagency
• Media training
• FEMA training
• Technology training
Materials
• Laptops
• Power sources
• Printers
• Hotspots
• Contact lists (electronic and hard
copies)

6. DURING – SAFETY FIRST
 All actions and communications should
support safety.
 Implement your plan.
 Provide regular, consistent updates to
all of your audiences.
 Employees, customers, board members,
elected officials, etc.
 Identify a place where people can go
for updates.
 Ensure key staff avoids fatigue.
 Ensure legal and agency leadership
approves all information.
 Circulate that information internally
DON’T DO
Say no comment Say what you know.
Even if it is not
much.
Minimize the impact
or deflect
Express empathy
Lie Show action (what is
your company
doing?)
Speculate Discuss coordination
Defend bad policies Provide them info on
how they can get
more info or assist.

7. Crisis management in the
new media age
Information spreads like wild fire.
• It is crucial that you coordinate a consistent
message.
• Empower your employees, stakeholders to act as
ambassadors by providing them with accurate
info and asking to help disseminate.
• Social media policy should give guidance on
how to interact.
Smart phones means photos and videos WILL surface.
• Always agree to “look into”
Use social media to:
• Provide updates to stakeholders.
• Respond to questions/concerns.
• Monitor top concerns, key issues (important to
report these to leadership)
• Quantify customer impact and effectiveness (# of
complaints, avg response time, etc)
• Tools exist that allow you to manage all account
from one platform and offer some metrics.

8. AFTER
 Maintain communications with new stakeholders, followers, etc
 Express appreciation to stakeholders (employees, customers, elected officials)
 Continue to work with legal to approve communications due to possible lawsuits
 Debrief  What went right? What went wrong? How can we improve?

9. Now is the time to prepare…
(Not an endorsement of any one religion over the other…just a lesson in preparation told through a well known story.)

10. QUESTIONS?