Crisis Communication: Building An Effective Program

The amount of investment made to assure that an effective crisis communication plan is set can be a tricky calculation — sufficient preparation is fundamental to mitigating the impact of major risks, but overinvestment is a risk in and of itself. Forrester surveyed 345 Disaster Recovery Journal subscribers to determine how they approach business continuity and crisis communication. The responses showed that the most common objective of crisis communication is to guide employee response (cited by 93% of organizations), cell phones are the most common method of communication (used by 97% of organizations), and 66% of companies planning for the loss of telecommunication services included SMS text messaging in their contingency plans. Security and risk professionals should consider the results of this survey and review their plan to ensure that it incorporates common communication methods, considers loss of telecom services, and is ready to be invoked as soon as it's needed.