Crisis communications planning and Wikis

The crisis communications plan is the Achilles heel of many organizations.

Although most companies around the world have a communications plan - or maybe several plans - they often are outdated, not understood by the rest of the organization and do not “live” once they are written down.

One social media tool which can help to invigorate your crisis communications plan is a wiki. A wiki is a website which can be edited, through a simple online word processing editor, by multiple people in a secured environment.

The use of a wiki for crisis communications purposes starts when the plan is being written. Instead of creating yet another document, the wiki allows for putting everyone involved in the process literally on the same page.

Planning, crisis mapping and scenario building would all happen on a secured wikisite only open to those who need to be involved in the process.

The wiki can easily be organized into the different aspects of crisis planning. Forms can be created, reactive statements can be pre-drafted for each scenario and so on.

The nature of a wiki is that it is always accessible through the web and that it can be "edited on the fly", adapting itself to possible new situations which could develop.

During a crisis, a wiki also plays its role in that every update, change and activity is recorded with a time stamp and the name of the editor. This allows for quick validations of statements, facts and responses and creates an automatic record of all actions taken by the organization during the crisis.

This is an important feature, crucial for post-crisis analysis and possible requests by law enforcement or public instances later on.

And since a wiki uses RSS feeds, some parts of the content can even be used as internal situation updates for employees by republishing these to a company intranet.

Of course a crisis wiki will only be as good as the crisis team using it, but it does bring all aspects together in one and the same online environment serving as a central “place to go” before, during and after a crisis.

Article originally published in Communication Magazine - Author: Philippe Borremans - Date: July 1, 2010

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