Prepare your crisis website: 5 tips for communicators

1. Create a technically secure crisis website

Having a strong technical foundation is essential to ensure that your crisis website can withstand the pressure of a crisis.

Tip: Make sure that responsibilities for technical preparedness are clearly defined, so that resources and systems can handle an increased load or overload attacks. Also have alternative tools and channels ready in case something unexpected happens.

2. Prepare for mobile use

Many people access information via their mobile phones during a crisis, so it's important that the crisis website is optimized for all devices. Think mobile from the start when building your crisis website.

Tip: Regularly test your crisis website on different devices and ensure that information is easily accessible, even during high traffic.

3. Implement web analytics tools for crisis monitoring

Being able to measure and analyze behavior in real time during a crisis can provide invaluable insights. To effectively use web analytics during a crisis, it is important to have integrated the necessary measurement tools beforehand. As always when it comes to measurement tools, it is important to analyze the data with a source-critical eye, something that Mats Eriksson emphasizes:

- "Train your team to interpret analytics data with a critical eye, and always ask yourself the question: does this data actually reflect the needs of the whole audience, or just a part of it.

Tip: Implement tracking to see which questions and pages are most visited during a crisis. This will give you a quick insight into what is most important to visitors - and you can adapt your communication accordingly.

4. Clarify roles and responsibilities

A well-functioning crisis website requires that everyone in the organization knows what to do when the crisis is a fact. Clear roles and responsibilities are the basis for good preparedness.

Tip: Define who is responsible for updating the crisis website, which channels will be used and who has the mandate to communicate in different forums. Allocating roles and responsibilities before the crisis occurs reduces the risk of confusion.

5. Use the crisis website as a base for crisis information

During a crisis, the website or crisis web becomes an information base that brings together all important messages. This makes communication consistent and easy to reuse in other channels.

Tip: Plan to be able to quickly reuse and compress content from the website in social media and other channels. This way you will have a unified and quality-assured message throughout the crisis.

Finally, Mats wants to convey the importance of testing and establishing new tools before the crisis arrives to ensure that they work when they are needed most. During a crisis, it is not the time to experiment - every tool must already be familiar.

If you want more advice and recommendations on how to act as a communicator in a crisis, download Mats Eriksson's book Digitaliserade kriskommunikatörer External link..