Crisis Communications Means Planning for the Crisis You Didn’t See Coming
When it comes to storm communications, timing is everything.
As a marketing agency supporting a large regional utility’s paid media and storm communications, we know preparation is just as important as timing. As tornado season approaches, especially in the South, preparation really matters. When severe weather hits, whether it’s tornadoes, snow, ice, or hurricanes, there’s no time to start from scratch.
This winter, our team was reminded of an even more important truth: your crisis communications plan has to account for the unexpected within the unexpected.
Ahead of winter storm Fern, our team was already in motion… securing approvals, trafficking creative, and pushing paid media live before the first drop of snow and ice. Like many large utilities, our client needed to proactively communicate safety information, outage preparation guidance, and restoration expectations.
Then, in the middle of it all, a Microsoft outage disrupted the very systems we rely on to collaborate and execute.
Email stalled. Approval chains became harder to manage. At the exact moment when speed and clarity mattered most, our tools became unreliable.
It was a powerful reminder: a crisis plan that only accounts for the primary emergency isn’t complete.
The Second Crisis Problem:
In nearly every large-scale event, there’s a secondary disruption.
If your communications plan assumes perfect infrastructure during imperfect conditions, it’s vulnerable. In fact, 41% of organizations report their communication systems fail during a crisis, including email and phone systems.
For utility providers especially, storm communications are not optional; they’re critical to public safety and customer trust. Paid media often plays a key role in ensuring updates reach customers quickly and at scale. But paid media execution depends on approvals, asset access, trafficking systems and platform stability.
When even one of those breaks down, the delays compound.
Stress-Testing Your Crisis Plan:
As we move into tornado season, here are a few questions worth asking:
- Do we have offline access to a critical contact list and important documents?
- Are creative templates pre-approved and easily adaptable?
- Do we have backup communication channels for internal coordination?
- Can media be deployed quickly if primary systems fail?
Crisis communications isn’t just about the message. It’s about operational resilience. 36% of organizations do not test their technological backup systems, increasing the likelihood of failure during a crisis.
Preparation Builds Confidence:
The recent winter storm, and the unexpected Microsoft disruption, reinforced something we already knew but don’t always pressure-test: preparedness isn’t about predicting every scenario. It’s about building systems flexible enough to withstand them.
Tornadoes will come. Ice storms will come. And occasionally, technology will fail at the worst possible moment.
The organizations that communicate best during crises aren’t the ones that avoid surprises. They’re the ones that plan for them. In today’s environment, resilient crisis communications isn’t just about weathering the storm, it’s about staying operational when everything around you starts to fail.
The question every organization should be asking now: Is your crisis communications plan ready for the storm behind the storm?
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