Crisis Communication Plan

Step 6: Evaluation

After the crisis is over and everything is back to normal, don’t forget to evaluate. Take the time to sit down with your crisis communication team and talk about what went well and what went wrong. What did you learn? What can be used next time and what needs the be changed in case of another crisis? Here are some questions that can help you evaluate your crisis response and improve it for the next time:

1. Did we follow our crisis communication plan?
2. If not, where did we leave the plan and why?
3. What happened that we didn’t foresee?
4. How can we work those unexpected things into our plan?
5. What were the responses to our statements?
6. Were there certain statements that people responded more positively to? What did they have in common, and how can we make future statements to more closely resemble those?
7. Were there similarities in people’s complaints?
8. How many comments/questions/complaints did we see across all channels? (Web, email, phone, Facebook, Twitter, etc)

These steps should help you successfully manage and carry off a crisis. You can look for inspiration and how-to’s in our toolkit Monitoring and evaluation.