3 key takeaways from COVID-19 crisis communications

The most unique aspect of crisis communication during COVID-19 is that it’s a shared experience. We are living through this together.

I’ve dealt with crises throughout my entire career, first as a reporter and then as a communications professional. The one constant was how different each one was for different audiences.

When I was a newspaper reporter and covering a crisis, my readers might have been completely unaffected or completely consumed by it. A plane crash in a different part of the state may not affect you personally, but the First Selectman of your town being corrupt did.

After I shifted to communications, a crisis felt very insular and isolated. When I worked at the National MS Society and we had a health emergency at a fundraiser, the reporter covering it was not directly affected. For corporate crisis work later in my career, the company could be in turmoil, but it had a limited scope for the general public.

With COVID-19, everything is different. We’re all living through the same crisis at the same time. I don’t need to explain to a reporter what it’s like working from home or the impact of knowing someone afflicted with the virus. It’s a shared experience.