Blakeford Senior Life – Crisis Communications Planning
After three years of working together on an ongoing media relations campaign, Blakeford Senior Life, a non-profit provider of senior living solutions in Nashville, tasked REED with creating a crisis communications plan and conducting a crisis media training session with executives.
Insight
The most critical piece of crisis communication is to be prepared.
Strategy
Understand all the risks posed to senior living communities and the specifics of Blakeford’s risk management protocol to develop a plan incorporating these elements and REED’s media expertise.
Activation
We researched Blakeford’s risk management practices, local crisis resources and guidelines, learnings from other senior living crises and relevant governing bodies and regulations. Based on our findings, ongoing communications strategies for Blakeford and years of experience training executives in media relations, we developed a customized plan.
We then created and conducted a four-hour training session with Blakeford’s president, CEO and COO, including a review of media interview best practices and a mock crisis session for the executives to practice the steps in the plan. We filmed the executives doing mock interviews regarding the simulated crisis, provided real-time feedback and shared the videos with them for continued practice after the training. The plan and training were also utilized to make recommendations to Blakeford about additional risk management procedures and best practices in a crisis.
Results
Blakeford’s leadership team and board were impressed by the thorough plan and training, and they felt prepared to take on any challenge that may occur moving forward with REED’s strategic guidance. Blakeford also engaged the REED team to conduct another crisis media training session with the organization’s CTO.
The Blakeford board was impressed with the project and said, “Overall, I think the documents are outstanding and address the issues as best can be without advance knowledge of the crisis we hope does not occur… Thanks to you and everyone on your team who was involved in developing this document.” They were thrilled we included a risk management recommendations document and plan draft, and they shared that the plan was comprehensive, well-written and had zero edits. They also agreed with REED’s recommendation to test the plan annually.