Blog | 17 October 2024
Prepare your crisis website: 5 tips for communicators
A crisis can happen when you least expect it. With a prepared crisis website, communicators can ensure that the right information reaches the right audience quickly. Mats Eriksson, researcher and author of MSB's Digitalised Crisis Communicators, shares his best advice on how to strengthen preparedness for a crisis.
1. Create a technically secure crisis website
Having a strong technical foundation is essential to ensure that your crisis website can withstand the pressure of a crisis.
Tip: Ensure that responsibilities for technical preparedness are clearly defined, so that resources and systems can cope with an increased load or overload attacks. Also have alternative tools and channels ready in case something unexpected happens.
2. Prepare for mobile use
Many people access information on their mobile phones during a crisis, so it is important that your crisis website is optimised for all devices. Think mobile from the start when building your crisis website.
Tip: Regularly test the functioning of your crisis website on different devices and ensure that information is easily accessible, even during high traffic.
3. Implementing web analytics tools for crisis monitoring
Being able to measure and analyse behaviour in real time during a crisis can provide invaluable insights. To effectively use web analytics during a crisis, it is important to have integrated the necessary measurement tools beforehand. As always when it comes to measurement tools, it is important to analyse the data with a source-critical eye, something that Mats Eriksson emphasises:
– Train your team to interpret analytics data critically, and always ask yourself the question: Does this data actually reflect the needs of the whole audience, or just a part of it?
Tip: Implement tracking to see which questions and pages are most visited during a crisis. This will give you a quick insight into what is most important to visitors – and you can adapt your communication accordingly.
4. Clarify roles and responsibilities
A well-functioning crisis website requires that everyone in the organisation knows what to do when a crisis occurs. Clear responsibilities and roles are the basis for good preparedness.
Tip: Define who is responsible for updating the crisis website, which channels will be used and who has the mandate to communicate in different forums. Allocating roles and responsibilities before the crisis occurs reduces the risk of confusion.
5. Use the crisis website as a base for crisis information
During a crisis, the crisis website becomes an information base that brings together all important messages. This makes communication consistent and easy to reuse in other channels.
Tip: Plan to quickly repurpose and repackage content from your website across social media and other channels. This will ensure a coherent and quality-assured message throughout the crisis.
Finally, Mats wants to convey the importance of testing and establishing new tools before the crisis arrives to ensure that they work when they are needed most. During a crisis, it is not the time to experiment – every tool must already be familiar.
If you want more advice and recommendations on how to act as a communicator in a crisis, download Mats Eriksson's book Digitaliserade kriskommunikatörer. External link, opens in new window.
RESEARCHERS AND AUTHORS
Mats Eriksson
Mats Eriksson is Professor of Media and Communication Studies with a specialisation in strategic communication at Örebro University. His research mainly concerns the borderland between strategic communication, organisational communication and risk and crisis communication. Over the years, Mats has carried out external research and investigation assignments for the Swedish Emergency Management Agency, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, SOS Alarm and the Swedish Transport Administration.
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