How to prepare for an extreme weather crisis

Anyone who works in PR knows that your day can change as fast as the weather—sunny and glorious one minute and dark and stormy the next.

Many PR pros across the country are braced for extreme weather in the months ahead.

You can’t control the weather, one of the perks of our job is that we can control our reaction it, or any adverse situation, for that matter. Do you have a communication plan in place if a crisis situation should roll in?

Here are the top three action steps you take when deploying a plan of attack after a natural disaster:

1. Be proactive.

Make your job easier by anticipating the crisis before it arrives and preparing a system of communication. Decide on the chain of command for decision-making and who will speak on behalf of your company when controversy strikes.

If you wake up one morning and a tree has fallen on your office building, who would you call first? Who develops the message? Who has to approve it? How would you get the message to your employees, customers and other key stakeholders? How will you handle calls from the news media? Do you have a media-trained spokesperson?