Crisis readiness should be on EVERY company’s radar.
When a crisis can happen to any company at any time, having a plan in place means less scrambling – and a quicker response may help mitigate any damage it may do to your brand.
On this episode of PR Explored, I talk with crisis communications expert Shawna Bruce, CD (MA DEM), principal of M.D. Bruce & Associates Ltd., about how EVERY organization can prepare for a crisis.
We’ll take YOUR questions – and cover:
- What crises are in the news that we can learn from?
- When you have to respond to a crisis in real time, what’s most important?
- What should leaders do to be crisis-ready?
- What belongs in a crisis plan?
Show summary:
In this episode of PR Explored, host Michelle Garrett, a PR consultant, author, and writer talks with her guest crisis communications expert Shawna Bruce, who shares her 40-year communications background, including 25+ years in military public affairs, work at Dow Chemical, and her current focus (since 2018) on training organizations to prepare for crises.
They discuss why crisis communications is now operational infrastructure, how to anticipate risks by studying incidents in your sector, and the importance of preparation, practice, reviews, succession planning, and internal coordination.
Bruce emphasizes message maps, fast approvals (including pre-approved holding statements), using owned media as a crisis hub, and having backups/shadows and realistic exercises ranging from lunch-and-learns to multi-day shift-based drills.
They address AI-driven misinformation, the need for trusted official channels, careful use of AI for planning (not unsupervised response), and how trust is tested and reinforced during crises rather than built from scratch.
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
01:57 Shauna’s Crisis Background
04:46 Preparation Over Parachuting
06:01 Why Crisis Comms Matters Now
09:33 Anticipating Risks by Sector
14:07 Comms as Part of Response
17:04 Air Canada Language Lesson
21:34 How to Practice Crisis Drills
29:09 Small Business Crisis Basics
33:23 Preapproved Holding Statements
35:35 Trust and Cadence in Crisis
38:02 Internal Comms Ripple Effects
40:20 Track Issues Before Crisis
41:20 AI Misinformation Reality
43:36 Own Your Channels
50:59 Build Trust With Humanity
52:36 AI For Planning Not Response
57:10 When Everything Feels Crisis
58:57 Educate Leaders And Triage
01:05:18 Preparedness Resources Wrap
Show notes:
Follow Shawna Bruce on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnabruce/
Visit Shawna Bruce’s site: https://www.mdbruceandassociates.com/
Full transcript:
Staying Crisis-Ready_ What Matters Most_
Michelle Garrett: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome. Welcome to another episode of PR Explored the PR podcast, where we delve into trends and topics related to public relations. I’m your host, Michelle Garrett, a PR consultant and writer, and my guest today is my friend and crisis communications expert, Shawna Bruce, welcome Shawna.
Shawna Bruce: Thank you, Michelle. It’s always so great to be with you and your network of friends, so thanks for the invitation.
Michelle Garrett: I love you so much. I love what you share on LinkedIn, and I’m just so glad and you’re, you’ve been here before with me and I really appreciate you coming back because I’m always like, there’s so much crisis in the news all the time now that I’m, every time something happens and I’m always like, what would Shawna say?
What would Shawna do?
Shawna Bruce: Shawna’s probably rolling her eyes saying that was preventable, but not always in today’s environment. But I always appreciate the invitation because, we, connected [00:01:00] on LinkedIn and I think it’s another great example of the amazing network of largely women, female entrepreneurs that are in the communication space, that are empowering and supporting one another with the different avenues that we take to specialize in.
So I appreciate the invite back. That means it didn’t go too badly last time, so thank you.
Michelle Garrett: No, I think I, like I said, I really, you’re one of the people on LinkedIn and I think really shares valuable. Stuff. not that others don’t, but it’s ne it’s never AI generated, junk. It’s always on point and, it’s just, there’s so much to talk about in, in your field.
but not everybody has as much experience and perspective, so I appreciate that. And as on that note, can you just share a little bit, and I will put a couple links in here for people to sure. Follow and connect with you. Just tell us about your background or anything you want to share before we dive in here.
Shawna Bruce: my name is Shawna Bruce, and [00:02:00] I am calling in today from Alberta, Canada. That’s where I live, and I always appreciate these opportunities to engage with Michelle and her audiences because I think that she has one of the, has one of the most stellar careers in pr. She shares, she talks about me sharing learnings, but she does absolutely the same.
I learn as much from her every day on what she shares on LinkedIn and the different connections she’s made with this podcast. So I’m very honored to be here. I have been working in communications for 40 years. It’s a long time. I laughed because at a workshop, not too long ago, I shared that. I can still remember when we used to drive news releases around when I worked in Ottawa for National Defense Headquarters, and we would physically drop off news releases to the newsrooms.
that’s a long time ago. So I have seen a lot of different communications, challenges, tools, technologies come in and out of. Realm of work that we do. I started my career in the military as a [00:03:00] civilian first and then in uniform and did Army Public Affairs for over 25 years. I’m a graduate of Dinfos in the US of the Defense Information School back in the day.
And then when I left the military, I was looking to retire. I realized I did a lot of issues in crisis management, in uniform. So I went I, this is honestly what happened. I went to the Google and I went and I said. Issues in crisis management, masters and OP up this program for disaster and emergency management at railroads in Victoria here in Canada.
And I thought, huh, I’ve supported a lot of those kinds of deployments. I’d like to do that. So then I switched gears and started to specialize in this arena. Then I went to work at Dow Chemical for eight and a half years, managing public relations across our Canadian sites and the headquarters in Calgary.
But I had an introduction to risk communications and making neighbors aware of worst case scenarios and how to protect themselves and their families through emergency communications. So I got into that arena [00:04:00] when I decided to retire and hang out my own shingle. I really was, I was invited back to do more teaching in that space.
How do we prepare people to better respond in a crisis? I maybe was a little naive that I didn’t realize when I left the army that, or the military. I thought everyone got these skills in their. But I quickly realized they do not, it’s a specialized skillset. And when I left industry, that skillset was still needed and that, and a friend asked me to come out and train her team, and that’s how I got started.
So since 2018, I’ve been going into organizations, municipalities, industry, et cetera, and helping them better prepare to respond in a crisis and, get ready for those days when, it really matters most, when your comms really matters. So that’s what I do now.
Michelle Garrett: And you help them prepare. I wanna underscore you ahead of time.
Shawna Bruce: and it’s not that I’m not there to help anyone in a crisis if they need support. I do a lot for some industry people that don’t have onsite [00:05:00] crisis communications people. I’ll provide advice and guidance, but I’ve always, COVID taught me a good lesson because I was asked to come in and be a public information officer and information officer for some municipalities, and I stepped back a little and I said, I will come in and support and, mentor your team.
I will train them on the spot, but I’m not gonna be your information officer. I don’t know your people, I don’t know your community, I don’t know your processes. It’s, it would not be right to parachute me in a crisis to try to run things. And so I really try to get at that pointy end of the pencil, so to speak, at the beginning to say, bring me in early.
Let’s talk about how you run things. let me see what you have. Let me show you some areas of improvement I can help you close some gaps on, and let’s get you feeling more confident with the right skill sets to respond. That’s my sweet spot. Yeah. I say my public safety as my sandbox and I do a little bit of things in that sandbox, but that’s [00:06:00] my sweet spot I would say.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, I think confidence. I think that’s a huge, that’s a huge thing and, whatever. Often when, I talk to experts, on these episodes, we, it comes back to that often. I feel like if you’re speaking, if you’re, in, in a crisis, there’s all kinds of situations where if you cannot have the confidence unless you’ve actually done the work to get there, I think, or have the experience maybe, have been being through these, living through these, in the past.
But I just feel like it’s something, companies don’t think enough about. And it’s really changed a lot because, I feel like it’s, it used to be like, oh. There might be a crisis that popped up, some natural disaster or something, maybe a, an executive did something or whatever.
But now I just feel like it’s, [00:07:00] every day there’s something. And a lot of it is driven by social media, the internet, and so it’s just a kind of a different world now. And that’s why I feel like it’s really important for every single organization, company, any business to have at least something in mind or in place.
What happens if this happens to us. And then. just think through that at least.
Shawna Bruce: and I would say to you that crisis communications is no longer a nice to have. It’s like an operational infrastructure. It’s a requirement. Those communications are operational and every organization now, they’re operating in a risk environment where crises are faster because of what you mentioned, social media, ai, they’re more visible because of those, tools and technologies, and they’re more interconnected.
When we talk about that poly crisis and how, things are happening and they’re more interconnected, so it may mean it’s not necessarily just your lane that you’re in anymore, but you have to think [00:08:00] about the merging lanes that are coming into your crisis. And I would say to you, that you can’t predict every crisis out there, but you can absolutely prepare how you’ll communicate when one happens, if you actually think through and think past a plan and prepare your teams and practice.
The practice is what builds the skills and the confidence. Putting someone into an operational setting for the first time during a major crisis event is not going to instill the confidence they need to be successful. And, then we get into that whole mental health element of how we’re, managing these teams and what we’re doing to these teams.
Think about that. It’s not just a plan. You have to prepare. You have to, practice, you have to, then you have to review that plan and go through the whole process again and see where there’s areas of improvement. So I think there’s elements there that people think, oh, you can’t predict every crisis.
So why bother predict any, [00:09:00] because how you respond to that crisis, whether it’s a cyber attack or an operational failure, or a leadership crisis It, matters those first few words and that first inject of how you’re gonna manage that narrative matter.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, and that’s, I’m gonna put up, this was not gonna be the first question, but I’m gonna go ahead and put it up anyway, because we can’t plan for every possible crisis.
But it is, it wise to anticipate the types of crises your organization may face. And I think you have addressed it a little bit there. So
Shawna Bruce: a hundred, a hundred percent. But I would say to you, because I often work in the emergency management space, we talk about risk threats and hazards, right? So we’re, wildfire, overland, flooding, tornadoes, all of those.
So yes, there’s that. However, I always say, what about those internal risks? What about, leadership risks? What about fraud cases? If you wanna really understand what’s happening in the world, put in local government [00:10:00] fraud, and see how many hundreds of cases pop up, hundreds of cases, some of the most bizarre scenarios, you’ll, think that could have never happened.
And it’s true, it’s happened. So I always say to municipalities or, local governments like, think through this. But I would say that one of the elements, that really comes to mind with that is people say, how can I predict Shawna? That’s ridiculous. You can’t predict. But if you are a, let’s just pretend you worked in the chemical industry or the oil and gas sector, or you were a post-secondary school, institution Nonprofit. If you even followed and looked at incidents happening within your sector. What a great learning, learning environment that is after action reviews, feedback in the press, communications. That is a constant, element that you should be looking at. If it’s happened to someone else in your industry, it could darn well happen to you.
And what a great way to learn what went well, what did go well. Even language. Sometimes I’ll even [00:11:00] copy language that I really like that someone’s used and just tuck, tuck that away for a client in the future, what have you. So I think that’s part of it. we have to drop the, arrogance. That it’s not gonna happen to us.
We’d manage it differently. We’re so much better prepared, and that has to go to the wayside, and we have to be realistic. If it’s happened to someone else, it could absolutely happen to you. So look outside your box and look outside, inside your industry outside to see what could affect inside and outside your organization.
Michelle Garrett: And I would say, and I think you touched on this too, even if it’s not the exact type of crisis, it’s doing the legwork and going through the motions of preparation for any crisis is gonna help you deal with any crisis, right? at least you’ve thought through it and you have maybe, a, plan in place that you can refer to.
Who am I gonna call, who needs to be involved, that kind of thing, just. Even [00:12:00] basics,
Shawna Bruce: even sector even grouping it. So I said, we used to talk about individual message maps for different hazards and stuff in the community. But maybe now you’re, looking at it, okay, what if we have something that’s a leadership trust crisis, something happens with the co response, or, there’s a gap in some language that we used or something we shared, or maybe it’s an operational failure becomes this public crisis over here, or it’s a misinformation driven crisis.
Like maybe we are categorizing that in our plans to think about how we’d respond to those. So it’s not specific so that people don’t throw out the playbook if they say, oh, this doesn’t align. Exactly. Like we said, that happened in COVID, right? We had a, there was a comp, there was a health authority, I wanna say it was in a US state, but I can’t remember which one.
And they had been practicing the same pandemic plan for over 20 years. 20 years of annual reviews when COVID hit the leadership at the time of the board, threw it out and said, oh, we didn’t write this [00:13:00] plan. We, need to start from scratch. Who does that in the middle of a crisis? I was, it was like, I was like, are you kidding me?
So my point is, at least if you have a starting point and how you’re gonna do it, and you don’t have to rewrite the whole plan, but, how are we getting approvals? Who’s gonna be our spokesperson?
what tools are we using? Where are audiences going for information? If you have done that legwork and the groundwork, you will be a hundred percent more prepared to respond to that crisis.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And you mentioned all the different types of crises because I When I was writing my book, I was like, I really need to. Make sure that, I mentioned because it’s, I think when somebody thinks of a crisis, they might have just an I idea of one or two things, but it’s so many things.
it could be financial, it could be a natural disaster. it could be like, an executive misstep. It could be, it could just be, [00:14:00] any number of things. a customer complaint can go viral. It you just, it’s hard to.
Shawna Bruce: You don’t know. And what people need to understand is that the response and how it’s perceived, the, crisis is not just about the incident itself, it’s how you communicated af during that response.
That’s what people are, taking. That’s what they’re evaluating you on. what I work in the emergency management space, I tell a lot of firefighters, you can have a textbook case of putting out that major, industrial fire or major apartment complex fire, and you had, can save everyone and do a great job on that.
But if you haven’t communicated what you did during that response to your public, they think you failed. They’re searching for information online. They wanna know what you did. How many fire trucks were there? who all responded was there mutual aid. That is the same with, any crisis. you, we have to think that it’s strategic, that your response is part of the [00:15:00] crisis response.
It’s no longer, it’s not an add-on, it never was, never should have been. Your communicators need to be at the table right at the beginning when you’re discussing how you’re gonna respond to help provide that advice and guidance to you. Now, leaders though, they make the final decision, they may not make the decision.
If you go in with some courses of action, here’s A, B, and C. This is what I think the consequence will be. If you choose A, this is if you choose C, and if your director, your leader or ceo, EO says, I’m gonna go with B and morph in a little bit of this and that. It’s our job as communicators, then to walk away and communicate that’s our job.
Once the decision is made. I have worked with a client though that had a real challenge where the leadership seemed to want communications to make the decisions. No, that is not our job. Our job is to not to write the response for you. Our job is to articulate and convey the communications you want us to share.
You make the decision on [00:16:00] how the company or the organization’s gonna respond. We will tell you how best to communicate that we don’t make the decision for you that has happened more often than not sometimes with communicators that get stuck in this space. And if we don’t like the decision they make, then our job still is okay, how do we mitigate what’s gonna happen?
’cause they didn’t make. Maybe what we consider the right decision, but, a CEO or leader, Michelle, they may have the big picture, they may understand more than we do, have more information than we do, be privy to things we’re not. So they are still, they make the big bucks and the decision rests with them.
That’s why that, that the buck stops there with them.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And I feel like sometimes when I’ve watched these press conferences after, an, a disaster or some kind of a, crisis or, sometimes I feel like egos get in the way, even as far as who’s doing the speaking, who the spokesperson is and what they’re sharing.
And so that’s always an interesting, thing to watch as, somebody who, [00:17:00] works in the communication space. So I was like,
Shawna Bruce: And that does happen because people will, think that, oh, it has to be so and So if I could talk for a moment, I’m just going to, give you the example of we had the terrible tragedy of Air Canada with the Air Canada pilot and copilot on the ground in the us, where there were two fatalities and they hit that, truck and, really sad situation.
So the CEO, so thinking about this, air Canada’s flagship airline, it’s based in Montreal, Quebec, where French is the first language. And the CEO gave the message that he gave, said hello, and at the end, thank you for whatever, at the end in French, in two or three words. But the eng it was only an English delivery.
Only in English. Now, that did not resonate well with Canadians. It did probably did not resonate well with those families who both, have, have that [00:18:00] have that situation in place where they’re probably French language speaking first. but from a f flagship company, a national company in Quebec, people expected a French message.
So it really quickly went away where the focus should have been on support and sympathy and compassion and empathy for those families. And quickly moved in this political, hot potato with him being called to Ottawa in front of the Prime Minister, et cetera, et cetera. He’s been, he’s re, I don’t know if he planned to retire, but he is being let go from that position, from Air Canada.
It’s escalated to that. But here’s the thing, five years ago there was another incident where the public and the media got very vocal because he did not speak French and he had been apparently taking French courses. I don’t know all the ins and outs from this. This is me piecing it together as well with the public information available.
But in my head, I thought if you were the communi, I, saw that whole thing as a communications failure. Because if your [00:19:00] CE o’s gonna, if that’s your worst case scenario, and of course it is a plane crash or an incident involving your crew. And you know you’re gonna have to deliver in both official languages.
You, by gosh, better have someone available to talk. So even if it was the CEO gave in English and you had a deputy speak in French, or you handed that CEOA very phonetically written note that he read on camera verbatim, people would’ve understood. There was none of that. And I just felt that maybe the comps now maybe they told him he needed to do that and he refused.
You can’t control that either. But I just thought we saw an issue over here and that we repeated it during a real crisis and look how it landed.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And such a simple that, sometimes I feel like you can’t, things that you get criticized for maybe you really couldn’t foresee, but this seems like something a very simple, fix,
Shawna Bruce: and I felt badly formed because they were saying like, you [00:20:00] should have been able to speak French.
He’s been taking her for five years as a mother of, twin daughters, who were both 31 now. So they’re, young, they’re adults, who went through in the same house, raised the same way with French speaking, parents. My husband’s more bilingual than I am French immersion their whole life. I have one daughter who is a French immersion teacher today.
She speaks French every day. She married a, her husband is Francophone. They speak French in the house. My other daughter can read and write, but you would never, she would never speak it publicly. I understand that not everyone has a linguistic ability. I guess that’s my point. Two kids, same house, same exposure, very different capabilities in a second L and their French is a second language, but I hope, they don’t listen to this podcast and get offended there.
But, all that to say, so I get it. That, that, that happens. This case I thought was preventable.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, absolutely preventable and just like a one-on-one that, but see, this is the thing. If you don’t talk through, think through and plan for, [00:21:00] prepare for, I don’t know that you, maybe you just in the moment it’s easy to just react and you don’t maybe think about these things.
you’re stressed, So that’s why I also think there’s a benefit to planning and thinking through when you’re calm and there’s nothing really happening that’s got your, got your, got you all stressed out. we did have a question and I think, we actually had a couple questions, but I’m gonna save one for a little bit, because she was dropping the question and was gonna listen later.
So, Susan, says, you mentioned practicing the crisis response. What are your thoughts on the multi-day session where a few select people are working through a scenario, or do you recommend other ways of practicing?
Shawna Bruce: I’m gonna say that I think it depends what your industry is and, how you’re managing that.
So here’s the case in point. [00:22:00] I remember that. a lot of exercises are just a few hours. It’s really easy to respond and get everything right in a couple hour exercise. Oh, and X we’re done, da What do we do in that three hours? And we’re, not actually practicing. ’cause we normally say, oh, we, wrote a note news release, but we didn’t really, right?
Oh, we put this out. We did a news conference, but we didn’t really, we just said we were going to do it. we would talk about what our next steps are. We don’t actually go through the motions. And, I think it was a hydro company in Ontario at one time. I remember listening in on a webinar that they did, and they talked about how they started to run their exercises 24 7.
And they did that because it took them 24 hours to get electrical back up, like to get the lines back up. That was their average time for a response. So they realized we should be practicing that. But what it forced them to do was they did three shifts. Eight hours and it forced their employees to now be outside of work hours.
So now you had impacts to people that maybe had children at daycare that needed to be [00:23:00] picked up or you had impacts for people that were caring for their aging parents, people that were single parents. You had a whole lot of impacts in there. So I think part of running those exercises for multi days is having a, making sure par that your employees have a family care plan that they’ve thought through.
If this happens, if I’m critical and I’m being asked to come in and work overtime to manage this crisis, who do I have in my care network that can help me? The military and the army, I had one, we had one. I didn’t live near family. I had to have that articulated for the military. When nine 11 happened, I actually had to execute it and call on people in my plan.
So I think that’s one thing. It gets people outside of the crises don’t just happen in work hours. So that’s where more than a 24 hour cycle will work. But. When you have a multi-day session, you must be replacing those teams and backing up those teams. When you see just a few select people are working through it, that doesn’t make sense to me.
Every person who’s a lead [00:24:00] needs a shadow. They need a backup person that’s coming into drills, observing how decisions are made, how the cadence of comms is going, or the workflows going. That’s how you train your teams for when you’re not there. And that’s a real risk in organizations where you have people that have worked for a long time, but they don’t recognize that they have all the corporate crisis knowledge in their heads, and then they retire.
And, then Bob retires and Sue retires, and they all retire at the same time, right? Yeah. And there’s no one left holding the bag. So I, personally like the idea, especially for communications of a really focused tabletop exercise that you walk through scenarios for a lunch and learn. So you do it for 90 minutes.
Here’s the scenario. Let’s talk through, do we have this in our plan? How would we do this? Let’s walk through this. This is what I saw in the news. It happened to somebody else. How did they do this? I think they’re more effective sometimes than the multi-day plan, unless you’re gonna bring in different, different [00:25:00] teams to come in and take over and have to do a transfer of authority and a transition.
Okay. I hope that managed that answers, but I think sometimes comms doesn’t always get engaged, and I’m always saying to my clients, why aren’t you running your own comms crisis, comms Lunch and Learn series every month? Just. Take something outta the news and say, let’s have, let’s do a brown bag lunch, or I’ll bring in lunch.
Let’s talk through this. How would we have answered this or responded to this? I think there’s better learning in those.
Michelle Garrett: I think you, brought up an important point too, that you need to revisit occasionally because people do retire and, or change jobs or leave the company. And so that’s why I know sometimes people will say, we have a crisis communications plan.
It’s on the shelf, it’s in the file, whatever. And, but they haven’t looked at it, in over a year or much longer than that. So I just, it’s something, it’s not something that’s, set it and forget it. We’re done and
Shawna Bruce: [00:26:00] well, and, I hope that answers Susan’s question there because I will say to you that the risk of, I, I think the risk of that element that I shared of having that corporate knowledge and that crisis knowledge leave with the retirees is a real challenge.
And I recently, in the last couple years, did a review and brought in a team to help me with an industrial review. And I made that their number one risk. They were shocked because they hadn’t really thought that everyone in that company had been there over 24 years, 25, 26 years, and they were all coming up to the golden retirement age at the same time, and they hadn’t really thought about succession planning in the crisis space.
So that’s a, it’s a risk, right?
Michelle Garrett: It is a risk. and I think that’s a good way to frame it too, because I don’t think, again, I feel like a lot of times it is very like, it’s, it would be nice, but like,
Shawna Bruce: when I worked at [00:27:00] Dow Chemical, and we had a public affairs on-call team, the on-call team was made up of HR people, process operators, engineers, engineer, folks in, in the control rooms.
They were not comms people. And so I, but I couldn’t do everything myself. I needed a team. I had to build a team from what I had out of non communicators. But every time we had a drill, I would bring whoever was on call with me into that.
Michelle Garrett: E-O-C-E-C-C,
Shawna Bruce: whatever we call it, EOC, back op center. I would bring them in there because I wanted them to observe and not have their first time ever stepping in there as a day.
Sean is on holiday somewhere and they have to step in for me and not know where to sign in or how to do anything. Oh yeah. I wanted them to feel comfortable in the environment and and they would normally be my scribe because if you’re writing everything and trying to do everything, it’s really hard to keep up with all the forms ICS wants you to do.
And we were using ICS as our response model, so they would be [00:28:00] my scribe, but they were there really to just take it all in.
Michelle Garrett: That’s so smart too. And I liked what you said too about having, a backup, having someone shadow because sometimes people are not there, they’re out of town or whatever.
it’s just important, to have, a team and not just, couple people that know what’s way not ’cause it’s gonna be really hard again, in the stress and the time constraints and to really communicate what needs to be,
Shawna Bruce: and
Michelle Garrett: what
Shawna Bruce: needs to be done. And it’s very rare, like I could probably count on one hand the times that a crisis happens when all the right people are there during work hours and immediately available to answer your questions.
Because that never happens. Yeah. So you have to plan for the realities.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, absolutely. I think maybe we will just answer questions. ’cause there were, people that sent questions in ahead of time too, so
Shawna Bruce: yeah,
Michelle Garrett: sure. Let’s just do that and then we’ll see, if we have time, we’ll, go back to [00:29:00] my scripted questions and, hit those.
But I think you’re hitting a lot of the points, that, that are important as I’m not surprised at all by that. But, so Kathy, wants to talk, wants to know what to address, for smaller, newer businesses, what should they be doing to ensure they’re crisis ready? and I know that Kathy often works with startups, that might
Shawna Bruce: something.
I, you know what, first of all I’m gonna say Kathy, that I have watched really well equipped, resourced, large budgeted, if that’s even a word, know if I can use that word, organizations completely. Mess up a crisis response. And I have watched a team of one and a half palms people save their community from a grass fire, both here in Alberta.
And the difference is the smaller community, although [00:30:00] small and mighty, they had a plan and they understood what to do. So I would say to you that, if you can’t, if you don’t have a plan yet, understand your top five risks, what could happen to you as a new business? Business continuity, water main.
You’re, a hair salon and a water main breaks. What does that do for your business? you’re, you own the local sub shop and someone puts something viral on, on social media about finding a bug in a sub, and they make it up. It’s totally malicious, right? What are your top five realistic risks?
Think about those. Start planning with those ones in mind. Then think about who’s gonna speak in the organization. Define the roles. Who’s gonna do what, so you don’t all scramble together and try to do the same thing. Then I would say build a couple of message maps. I, really lean into having message maps.
I teach that a lot. Every workshop I teach a message map, 30 words per message, in a crisis. And we wanna talk with empathy and compassion. [00:31:00] The public wanna know three things, what happened? What are you doing about it, and what do they need to do? And you always give them something to do, whether it be to follow you on your social media or on your website.
which is another thing if you, any business should have a website. And the website should always be your comms hub. In a crisis you can use your social media and all of, and anything else. You have your YouTube, what have you. But always link everything back to your. Web as your crisis communications hub, you can put a lot more information on a, website than you can in a, post, right?
I would also say, that understand who has to approve your messaging, be and who, how you’re distributing your messaging. So even if you don’t have a plan, if you just looked, I wrote this before, but know who, know your top risks, define who’s speaking, know how to get things approved and out to who needs to see it, right?
And then build some message maps for those scenarios. That’s a great start. a larger organization should have a pretty, [00:32:00] I don’t mean comprehensive in a hundred pages, and I’ve seen that I’m talking a usable, effective plan, right? Because you, and, you’ve probably seen them too, Michelle, where a plan has all this gunk and all this stuff in it, in a real crisis.
It doesn’t, it shouldn’t tell you what you’re supposed to be doing. It should be showing you how to do it. Linking it to a template you can use as a holding statement, linking it to your message maps. Not just to say, put out a holding statement. No. Show me how to do that, spell it out and give me a draft.
Have it all in there. So those, that’s how I would say that you can start even with a small little on, business, newer business, smaller businesses. Those businesses have just as much opportunity for success as a large enterprise, because in some cases, more there’s less layers to go through for approvals.
But that’s where I would start.
Michelle Garrett: Yes. Fewer layers. that’s true for approvals. That’s very true. I feel like that’s, with, [00:33:00] any messages at all, any press releases or anything, and then, legal, we need to have somebody from the legal team, of course, in our crisis team, as that needs to be. And they need to be, really they can’t be taking, a week to approve things. It has to be really fast. And you have to be careful what you say. that’s why legal’s there.
Shawna Bruce: and depending on that legal thing, just to say to you, one of the things we did at Dow was because it did, our head, our mothership was in Midland, Michigan.
I’m in Alberta, and, when we did, we, used Everbridge as a notification system for near neighbors if there was ever anything. And the one thing we did is we had our legal team actually approve five. Holding messages for us that were already in our system, that I, of the five top risks we had, thankfully I never had to use them, but they were legally approved in advance and I had authority to release those right away because I don’t have time.
if I’m have a, dealing with some [00:34:00] kind of chemical situation, I don’t have time to be getting an approval from hours away. it’s life safety and so I would say to you that even if you went as far as to say, to get a legally approved holding statement that says, we understand about ex incident X, we are looking into it right now.
More information will be shared once we verified facts, watch this space or go to our website for more updates, whatever it is you’re gonna do something simple that gives no details that you can very quickly say to your lawyer, I wanna be able to have something like this ready. So I just have to fill in the blank.
I may not even be sharing what the incident is, but I’m making my, audience know. I’m aware there’s something percolating here. Yeah. We are on it. That alone buys you time. Valuable time. ’cause that’s the one thing in a crisis, you don’t have a lot of time to make decisions.
Michelle Garrett: Yes. I love these tips. See,[00:35:00]
Shawna Bruce: perhaps a shadow for more tips on the,
Michelle Garrett: it’s such great advice though. it, just, it may, it’s, to me, it’s somewhat common sense, but if we don’t talk about it and remind people how important it is, again, they’re, not gonna necessarily take it seriously until they’re in a crisis and then it’s really too late.
not, it’s,
Shawna Bruce: in
Michelle Garrett: deal then,
Shawna Bruce: And, that’s, and that’s, that’s what happens, right? When we’re dealing with this. I think it was the, Edelman Trust, for 2026 report kind of highlights that people are questioning what’s real, who to believe, like it’s getting harder and harder.
And that puts a lot of pressure on organizations to show up clearly and consistently. It’s not a one and done, it’s not. Put your leader out there once and talk about it and then, don’t do it. it has to be a cadence of information that is shared. That, and [00:36:00] maybe you’re saying it’s the CEO’s gonna speak twice a day or three times a day, so people can anticipate when to get that.
people, those leaders need to be visible and they need to speak directly to the people because people don’t wanna. They don’t want a statement, they wanna hear from a person. And, they have to inject some of their personality into those comments. And I think, we talk about trust in that foundation, and I think it’s really important that we understand that you don’t build trust in a crisis.
that’s not what happening. Trust. If it’s already uncertain how you’re communicating, you’re validating whether you have trust with your audience during that crisis. If you haven’t been building it and communicating effectively beforehand, you’re not gonna be starting it during that crisis.
Period.
Michelle Garrett: that was a question on my list was how can a crisis be an opportunity to build trust? And so you’re saying the trust needs to be there first ahead of
Shawna Bruce: time? it does. You have to. It, can, it is a bit of a trust test, I would say, but [00:37:00] I would say you could build on that trust or if you have to, if you’re starting from scratch, getting out there, early, getting out there first, getting out there fast with factual information, frequent information, understanding that you, it’s not, like I said, the one and done that helps reinforce that how, you’re responding to your crisis says a lot about you and your leadership in the organization.
And, remember that how we organize information inside our organization. Gets amplified when we go outside the organization. So if you’re not coordinating information internally, if you haven’t told your employees, if you don’t have the right people at the table weighing in hr, legal, safety, whoever it may be, if you don’t have the right people talking and getting that aligned, it’s not gonna look aligned when it goes outside.
it’s, just a thing. They go, they go like mittens hand in hand. They have to be [00:38:00]
Michelle Garrett: there. How many times does that happen? To your point about the internal audience? Because I feel like there are times when there’s something going on and they’ve made a public statement, but people inside the company weren’t aware until they heard it on the news or saw it on social.
I,
Shawna Bruce: and they don’t understand the cascading impacts of what happens. Like I did this exercise, down actually near Niagara Falls in the fall, and we had an entire municipality, team of administrators in the room and we had them sit in their direct, like their groups, right? oh, you’re public works and you’re HR and you’re whatever.
And we went. So I gave a scenario and then we walked it around the room and I said, okay, so hr, what are you thinking now? How is this impacting you? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Social services, what are you thinking? What? And we walked it around the room and there was this kind of aha moment when people realized just because a water, a [00:39:00] leak into the river, I have it over here in environmental operations, does not mean it doesn’t impact all of these other.
Groups in our organization. And sometimes people don’t recognize what other information or what others need from an information standpoint to make informed decision. And my point was share it all. Share it early and let those directorates pick out the pieces they need to their work and to prepare for any follow on with this crisis.
And I think that happens a lot. People think, oh, it’s just us. We just, only three of us need to know about this. When really the impact starts to expand. And you’re in a situation now where you’re not unified in your communications approach. You don’t have the same consistent messaging left hand and right hand don’t know what each other are doing.
And the public sees that, so then they get concerned.
Michelle Garrett: So yeah, I get nervous. They don’t trust. And again, the humanity, having the human be out there and [00:40:00] show some humanity, that helps build trust. I just, yeah, see, I don’t, again. People are not thinking like this. I, think it’s just easy to keep your head down and hope nothing happens.
when it does, it’s better to have at least, thought through some of these things.
Shawna Bruce: Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. And if I would say to you, we have a lot of issues that happen across organizations, and one of the elements that we should always look at is keeping an issues matrix and tracking those issues.
Sometimes they don’t need air to be amplified, but sometimes they do. They need to be tracked through an organization, and people need to understand the steps taken because it, oftentimes a crisis is an issue that wasn’t managed properly. So we knew about it. We watched it percolate across the Yeah.
the screen, and then all of a sudden it blows up because we didn’t hand manage it, we mismanaged it. So that’s another thing, if you’re in an organization that doesn’t keep a risk matrix of things coming in. That’s a really good starting point too.
Michelle Garrett: I’m [00:41:00] taking notes, yep. Oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna put post another question that was sent to me ahead of time because I did ask on social media if anybody had questions, because I knew that you were very interested in answering people’s what’s on people’s minds.
So that’s what we’re gonna focus on here. and this is something, that I’ve talked a little bit about, is how has AI slop and manipulation changed the crisis communications playbook?
Shawna Bruce: I wrote some notes on this, so I’m not being, I’m not being shifty, but I wanna just take a point at my notes here.
I think, oh, AI has. First of all, I just wanna say that where we were even five months ago with AI and where we were today is like 10 years past where people thought we would be the experts. If you tried to create an image on AI for anything five months ago, you’d never get it without spelling errors.
It, a third hand, a third. I like it. Always looked weird, Nowadays, if you try to [00:42:00] do that, I’m telling you, the technology has advanced so far. It is sometimes unrecognizable what you’re dealing with. So there’s that fake news and that AI that you that negative side of AI is certainly there.
I would say that, now the problem is anyone can create the, credible looking content. Yeah, we saw this in British Columbia wildfires last year. We had imagery that went out all across social media platforms suggesting that a fire was way beyond the scope and scale that the officials were sharing.
And they had these water bombers in the photo. But the water bombers, if you look closely, were not water bombers. They were actually part of our Canadian forces snowbirds aerial team of Tudor jets with the on there. They had like completely, anyone that could recognize that said, oh, that’s fake news.
but the province had to come out and, put out official statements about the misinformation out there. [00:43:00] so I would say to you that the problem with AI is that, it takes time. We have to be really watching misinformation and correcting it out there. When we see AI generated content that’s not real, that’s not credible, we have to be going back to the sources and it takes time on a team to manage that.
We have to monitor those digital spaces in real time. It’s not, I, have to have someone on it. Whether you’re hiring a group to do that, or you have staff that can do that, that aren’t directly involved with your response, that can be given a secondary duty. They could do it from home, right? They don’t need them in your ops center.
I think those are, key areas, but the other side of that coin is you really need to have your official channels. Made very clear on the onset. I go back to, if it’s your website or whatever, social media, the media you own, think about that. The media, you own, your YouTube channels, your social media channels, your Facebook page.
[00:44:00] I would go in so far as to say media is a tool in the toolbox, but they’re not the only tool anymore. You could be getting out a message to your people much more quickly, much faster with your narrative, using your own mediums than, overusing a press conference opportunity For an example, I’m thinking about, was it the Delta Airlines crash when the CEO was put it out on YouTube before he did the press conference in Washington, DC the next morning and he had something out there that night, which was great.
this is, people are starting to recognize that they have some. Power in the way the message is put out there with people. So I would say if you establish those trusted channels with people, it helps people start to think about ai. And you can also, during your crisis or emergency, be reminding people, I suggest this in every warning message.
follow only trusted and verified sources.
Michelle Garrett: [00:45:00] Yes,
Shawna Bruce: Follow, follow us here. Follow this. Trusted and ver we are only sharing trusted and verified information on our website, which you can find here, and even saying, please don’t share unverified information. there’s ways that we can, I don’t wanna say subliminally, but we can insert that messaging to remind people, oh, this might be fake, this might be ai.
But it is a challenge. I dunno if I’m answering that as well as you wanted me to, but, it has changed the way we do crisis comms, for the good in some way, but for this is that negative side for sure.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. I think it’s just a challenge, but if you’re, if your CEO or your, spokespeople are never out there, you can’t expect your audience to get to know them.
And then if this did happen where somebody created a deep fake and put it out there of your CEO or. Whoever it might be, they’re not as likely to know because they have nothing [00:46:00] to compare it to. If your audience knows and trusts you, they’re probably gonna spot the fact that, wow, this looks very much like this person, but this is not the kind of thing that they would ever say because, and I know this because, I’ve followed this company, I’ve followed, their executives and I know, that this is not something they would ever say.
And then, yes, check their ch official channels. Follow, a lot of times if you just consider the source, that’s always, something to think about. But again, we’re probably preaching to the choir a little bit here because I think people in comms know better than to just trust any old thing that’s out there.
But,
Shawna Bruce: but we can get caught too, right? Like we can get. We can get caught of. As a few years ago, there was something about military suicides as a veteran, I, didn’t look at the source, I just shared it. And I had someone, actually, it was a bit embarrassing, actually. It was a military public affairs [00:47:00] colleague of mine message me and said, Shawnee, you realize that’s fake news.
that’s not the right statistics, right? You have to go here. And I’m like, I didn’t realize that. It looked legit. It looked legit. I didn’t think twice I shared it. And, so then I went back and said I was sharing false information. this is actually what our Canadian statistics and US statistics, are involving veteran suicide, step by suicide.
But it was a learning for me that anyone can get caught.
Michelle Garrett: Yes.
Shawna Bruce: And I would say to you that I, one little point on that is when I get some people push, give me a little pushback when I say use the media you own, an iPhone, you have, and for 40 bucks, 40 bucks on Amazon, you can buy a lapel mic and a tripod.
you can be equipped to take a video of your CEO. In the moment and put it online for like under 50 bucks. No one has an excuse to not to be able to have that, capability to do that.
Michelle Garrett: Yes. And I think another thing is if your audience knows [00:48:00] you, they’re also gonna come to your defense if something occurs that seems off, or they’re gonna be like, no, we are gonna defend this person without even being asked because we trust and we have a relationship.
And, it’s all established ahead of time. So it’s just another reminder not to hide and, just to be transparent. I think that’s what
Shawna Bruce: those be transparent. And if I can say something, I, oh my gosh, I’m a bit, I don’t think I have it here. I’m a bit embarrassed that I don’t have this one book in front of me.
But I read in this chapter of this book, it was an industry example, but I think it could be work for everyone, anyone. It talked about how your website often. You open up a website and your landing page talks about who you are, what products you sell, et cetera, et cetera.
And this company was what she was recommending, this author, that you actually start with what you do locally in your community.
What you do for public engagement, start with that. And [00:49:00] I delivered that at a webinar not long ago. And lo and behold, there was an incident here I was looking at, it was a spill somewhere, oil and gas. I went to their website and they had done that. They had made their landing page all about a hockey, a girls’ hockey, program they were supporting in all of this.
And it just, I thought, okay. And then they had information news over here and I thought. All it did was give me a momentary min second to think, oh, they do good in our community. that’s a mind shift, right? Because I was going in looking for the blood. I was like, what happened right here? What was this, what happened with this leak?
Another one, are you kidding me? No, but I was immediately diffused that little bit of, I, because I saw them in my community light, this is what they do. This is the good things they do. I thought that was really good advice for anyone that is in that space that can actually manage that.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. As long as it doesn’t appear like they’re just
Shawna Bruce: doing it.
Yeah, it’s, just, it’s all it’s saying is they had that com, they had that compartmentalized on the website already, and now they [00:50:00] just brought it to the front, to the landing page and that, and I just, the way they did it was very professional and it didn’t seem. icky to me at all.
Yeah. So I thought, oh, good job on that. But, anyways, there’s different ways to do that. But I think a lot of organizations that have these engagement opportunities with their communities, these are chances to promote that internally and externally. Employees wanna be proud of the companies they work for.
They wanna see be seen in communities. And I think that’s an element there that sometimes we don’t, I don’t wanna say we do it for the photo op, I’m not suggesting that at all. ’cause I think it always looks good. Drive. But I think there’s an opportunity there to talk about those elements of your business a little more than sometimes we plan.
We do. We do.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And they make great, great pr,
Shawna Bruce: great PR call Michelle, she’ll have you organize your event or promote that afterwards. A hundred percent.
Michelle Garrett: There’s always something you can do with it, so it depends. but anyway, I do like that idea. I [00:51:00] just like the idea of building the trust and I think people are just, starving for humans, human, emotion, human stories, human, humanity.
And in the messaging and the, I don’t know. I just, I feel like we’re, that’s obviously a lot of that’s gone away because of ai and I feel like people are coming back being like, okay, like we crave this. We need
Shawna Bruce: this. Yeah. They want authentic engagement. Like they want something authentic.
They want people to be real. They, they don’t want it to polished. They don’t want, they’d rather have a CEO step up there and say, I know that this has been. I can only imagine how hard this has been for the families that have been impacted. We are working closely to try to support them in every way we can.
This is what we’re doing right now. we’re talking about what we know, what we’re doing, and what the next steps are. That’s the role of the CEO and this is what we’re gonna do next. we’re gonna start this investigation. We’re gonna be looking into this, [00:52:00] we’re gonna review our hr, policies on, harassment, whatever it may be.
There has to be an action there has, they have to take ownership of that situation and demonstrate they’re learning from it and what they’re gonna do to mitigate it. We never say it’ll never happen again. I would say mitigate it from happening again. but, I think those, that’s what people want.
Leadership. They want leadership.
Michelle Garrett: Leadership. Yes. we have a couple more questions. So here’s more. Susan is very, A lot of
Shawna Bruce: questions. Pleasure.
I love Susan. That’s great.
Michelle Garrett: So I’ll, read it. and you can think about how, what you might say here, what’s with the easy of availability of ai, what do you think of using it to help with comms during the planning process?
Things like coming up with scenarios, confirming audience segments, comms channels, et cetera during a crisis. Thoughts on having AI pressure test your messaging, un identifying any gaps. does it have value? A [00:53:00]
Shawna Bruce: hundred percent. If you’re a communicator that hasn’t delved at least into using AI either A, I think you maybe weren’t telling me the whole truth or, B, you, need to get on that train because, I’m using it for, and I tell clients, I, use it for scenario to build certain scenarios to help me find gaps, identify gaps.
message mapping, it can help, but I agree a hundred percent. It’s part of the preparedness phase. It’s not part of the, necessarily part of the response phase because you need to have human-centric emotional language used. And AI is not, it’s not there yet. I don’t think it’s there yet. And I feel that’s a real challenge.
We’ve seen, cases where messages have gone out and the bottom says, you’re getting an active assailant on campus alert, and the bottom says, chat, GPT, and I’m like. What is happening here? I, people do not, that’s not what they want right now. and I think that’s inappropriate use of that.
But AI is a tool. It’s a tool like anything [00:54:00] else, but it is not, it has to be a, what’s the word I can use? Supervised tool. It’s a, I think it can be used as an assistant in that way, but the language, if you can take your messaging and your message maps and you can socialize those internally or with the intended audiences.
Take them to one of your, if you have an hr, employee, we used to have an employee communications advisory panel at Dow. They would review those messages sometimes for us. Does this make sense? Does this not make sense? Review it with your intended audience, send it out to your, networks and that, and get that feedback in advance.
that’s what’s really critically important during the crisis itself. Yes. it can assist in some ways if you prompt it properly, if you’re constantly prompting it to say, what have I missed? I, my favorite thing is, what have I missed here? What have I forgotten to include? Is there an audience I’m not addressing?
If I’m doing it for a scenario and stuff and I’m giving people [00:55:00] different, roles in the scenario and stuff like that’s how I would use it. But I am always re nothing goes out that is not reviewed and double checked and verified. Yes, I will even ask it. Okay. If you’re gonna gimme an example on that, cite it for me so I can go to make sure it’s actually a true citation.
Six months ago you were not getting that out of chat GPT 5.3, but you know what it was then. But I think nowadays it’s, getting. Better. I, like it for taking, consolidating a report or consolidating an after action review. Can you identify the top communications challenges they had and show me the page in the paragraph.
So maybe I’m not, maybe I’m not scanning the 300 page document, but I’m able to, do that. That’s for me the value add. But I think, you just have to be careful how you use it and be aware that it’s a powerful tool and you wanna be careful that you’re not putting sensitive information in there.
That can get out. Yeah. And, [00:56:00] proprietary information or confidential information for sure too is a challenge.
Michelle Garrett: That’s what I always worry about is the confidentiality because, yeah. we sign those NDAs with our clients and we just have
Shawna Bruce: a hundred percent. You never wanna be caught with that.
And, if you’re, if I’m doing something and I do a, report, say like a strategy session, and I’m doing that and there’s no names, no nothing, I may use a certain version of AI to find any gaps. Identify gaps. I will always tell the client. The final review without any, attribute attribution was used to, identify any gaps, with the use of ai.
Like I will tell them upfront. If they don’t want me to use it, they’ll let me know. But normally that’s exactly how I’ll write that. But it’s, very generic. It’s not talking what a specific place or person. It’s a generic kind of conversation, but, I think you have to be careful with it.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, that’s good advice.
Can, do you have time for one more [00:57:00] question?
Shawna Bruce: Sure. Do.
Michelle Garrett: I came in ahead of time.
Shawna Bruce: Yes.
Michelle Garrett: This is a little bit of a unique question I feel, but, and I can expand on, on it if necessary. But, so, how do you plan for a crisis when your organization or business is in, constantly in a state of crisis?
like they just operate in kind of a chaotic environment or industry or, it’s just often that they don’t, it’s just you
Shawna Bruce: constant framework there that I think what’s really particularly important is understanding, are you, is it constant chaos? Depending on what the sector is, right?
Are you dealing with the same issues constantly coming up? Is it repeated crisis coming up? are they truly crisis that have an impact on people and on the, on, on the organization that’s impacting how you operate [00:58:00] daily? some organizations, I would say the military was very high tempo. We had high tempo operations all the time.
We were constantly go, It was constantly something managing issues, managing this and that. But really I would say crisis was brought in or interjected when we had a fatality situation or something like that. so high tempo can be one thing and it can feel you’re in crisis, but I think it’s, first of all, defining what that looks like for your organization.
Defining if you have issues matrix and you’re managing those issues well, so maybe you can mitigate some of the crisis impacts that are happening there. I would also say that it’s really. It’s exhausting working in that high tempo environment and having to be on all the time, like it’s exhausting.
Take care of your mental health, take care of your teams, make sure they’re getting downtime and rest and all of that good stuff. And also, maybe there’s an [00:59:00] opportunity to educate leadership. So what I mean by that is I used to have a boss and he would, when I get calls before seven o’clock on my Blackberry, I’d know, oh, it’s gonna be a bad day.
And he’d be like, oh, major Bruce, we’ve got a crisis. And I’d be, and I’d be thinking, and he’d tell me what it was. And I’d be like, this isn’t a crisis. This is, an issue. I can manage this. It’s not a crisis. I don’t need to bring anyone else in to support this crisis. ’cause in the military, you could always pull in resources, right?
But I had to educate people on what the difference was. In an issue. We have time. We have time to create holding statements, media response lines. We have time to bring in all the experts and think through what a good response is. An issue gives you time. I’ve written more holding statements in media.
Response lines was probably. A fine cabinet full of them that I never used. ’cause it never got to the point of the media finding out, or a question. The other side of that, if it’s a, if it’s a crisis and I need to be responding right now, it’s a different approach, right? [01:00:00] So I felt I had to educate my leadership on what the difference was and how we categorize them in public affairs.
Right? And that really helped me because it started that they wouldn’t tell me anything and I was never at the table. Then they were telling me everything and I was always at the table. And then I was like, oh, okay. I ought to find the balance here. And, I, want, I, and I always say, just tell me what it is and I’ll tell you what else I need to know and I’ll let you know if it’s gonna be a crisis or not.
’cause I’m the closest to the public in the media here. So it was right, but it, took education because most people, they don’t know what we do. They don’t know. They’re like, oh, communicate. What is that? oh, we, it’s better
Michelle Garrett: to just tell us everything and.
Shawna Bruce: Why decide, tell me everything and I will triage the information I need to cherry pick out to use.
Yeah. and I’m gonna tell you, and sometimes they would tell me stuff and I’d be like, oh. That’s gonna be an issue. And they’re like, what? Like, why would that be an issue? I’d say, [01:01:00] because in the community we’ve had this, and this percolating and this has happened over here and now we’ve had this, now we had this onto it.
That’s another layer. I think this could be a problem. We better have some media response lines. And I’ve had some people, senior people pull me aside and said, I would’ve never considered that, Shawna. That’s why we bring you here. And I think, okay, it’s taken me a couple years to get there.
Michelle Garrett: That’s why I love to have you here.
’cause I think that a lot of people are not gonna think the way that you do. And that’s what the value that you bring. And it’s, your insight is so valuable, is so helpful. ’cause I just think most of us are not thinking this way most of the time. So even those of us in comms, we’re not always focused on this, so it’s really
no.
Shawna Bruce: Ask my husband. I’m the glass half empty gal. He says, oh, you always, I, am always thinking about the risk. I, that is me. We, go camping. I’m the one that’s giving all my friends fire extinguishers for the trip. I’m, I am always thinking about the risk and, trying to be prepared. But I would say to you, that whole thing tell me [01:02:00] everything.
Let me triage the information. Our job in communicate. I always used to say to our, my teams, our job is to make the other person look good. Our job is to make our leadership and our organization look good. Yeah. I, and I would say that to my boss, sir, I can’t do that. If you keep me in the dark. If you go and get into trouble, I can’t say the right things to the media or take the right calls here.
I can’t mitigate this. Yes, you need to tell me what’s going on.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, I love that. our job is to make you look good.
Shawna Bruce: You look good, right? And it right do
Michelle Garrett: it. If you withhold
Shawna Bruce: and you only have to do it once or twice, you only have to save their bacon a couple of times or really show them what you can do in that comm space.
And then And then you get the other time, then you, then they go the other way and they bring in for everything. But I’d much rather be at the table and be able to leave when I can, instead of having to always bring my own chair to the table. I always used to say, invite me to the party. I’ll bring my own chair, my own loop bag, [01:03:00] my own hat.
I’ll just be there. But it’s, a critical thing is you gotta have that relationship and work on building that trust with your leaders.
Michelle Garrett: I feel like leadership is probably gonna be leaning on Pierre and comms folks more than ever because they get caught, maybe they weren’t prepared to speak and they got caught while they were at an event or out in public somewhere, and they just.
They’re set,
Shawna Bruce: right?
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And, but if they’re prepared, it would, they would be prepared to, in any scenario, basically, if they, if they, had a good relationship with their,
Shawna Bruce: if they had a good relationship. and if there’s, and if you’re saying, and that’s our job, I sometimes used to hand my boss, my site director off with like little, I’d say, here’s some key messages for today.
And he’d go, what do I need these for? I said, there’s a big media presence at this event, and they may ask you some questions.
Michelle Garrett: yeah.
Shawna Bruce: Here’s some things you might wanna think about. And he’d be like, oh, okay. And then he’d come back and say, I had to use that. He said, I actually used it for nice some business associates.
so then we started a little [01:04:00] proforma, you let me know what you need or where you’re going and stuff like that. Sometimes we need to be proactive, right. To be reactive in communications. And that’s just, our job crisis for sure. Yeah. But in, in everyday communications too, when we start to build those seeds of trust with doing things like that and making ourselves accessible.
And available and supportive. It helps build that, I think that
Michelle Garrett: foundation. Yeah. Yeah. We’re on their side.
Shawna Bruce: Yeah,
Michelle Garrett: we’re on the client side, the executive side, the leader side. We’re on the spokesperson side and we are here to help you. So help us help you.
Shawna Bruce: Help me help. And I can’t tell you, Michelle, when I was still in uniform in the Army, how many times I’d have to say to people, they, I didn’t, we didn’t want this to go to the media, so that’s why I’d invite you and I’d say, I’m, I wear the same rank and I’m in the same, I’m, we’re in the same organization.
you I’m actually not the media, right? I work with them for about a 10th of my job, [01:05:00] I’m not actually the media, right? just because you tell it to me doesn’t mean I’m phoning up a reporter. Like I think I actually had to educate people on that sometimes to my career.
I laugh about it now, but at the time it was like head bang wall, Like it was, yeah,
Michelle Garrett: I know. Crazy
Shawna Bruce: sometimes.
Michelle Garrett: is there anything else? I, know we’re over our time and you’ve shared so much great
Shawna Bruce: stuff. I just, try to look around you if you’re, or you never wanna be in that position of not being prepared if people are gonna be calling on you to respond during a crisis if they don’t have a, if listen to podcasts like this and look at, the Amanda Colemans out there and the Molly McPhersons and the Philip Bormans and all these people that are sharing information all the time and follow them on LinkedIn and listen to their free webinars when they have them.
If you can identify training opportunities, take them. Because really I feel this is a special skillset and, we have to almost [01:06:00] identify places to get the knowledge we need to be successful and to be effective. And I think anyone can be it both of those things, when they think about the preparedness piece of crisis.
Crisis response.
Michelle Garrett: Yes. as always, I just can’t thank you enough.
Shawna Bruce: It’s always a pleasure. Can talk all day.
Michelle Garrett: I, and I just, every time we talk, I’m, it’s such a, just, I don’t know. I, know some of these things I know, but, it’s just, it’s like you don’t think about it every day.
You’re not living it every day. And so it’s always good to have the reminders and then I always learn something new too. So I really thank you. And Susan says, thank you. Thank you, Susan, for asking questions. Thanks everybody who joined us today, please follow Shawna. Shawna, thank you. And I hope you come back again.
Shawna Bruce: I, will come back anytime you invite me. I’m here for you and I appreciate the questions today, the ones in advance that came from the audience and from those online today. Thank you, Susan, for being so engaged. I hope you [01:07:00] follow me. We’ll have a chat. If you ever need anything, let me know if there’s anything I’ve mentioned today that you, that I might have a template of or something just to reach out.
I’m very happy to share what I have in those spaces. I, really want everyone to be more prepared and, I’m, of that vintage, I think now where it’s time to just keep sharing stuff out there to get this next generation ready.
Michelle Garrett: I feel the same way. And yeah, you’re very open and, I was you.
We can trust you and that’s so important. Now we need trusted experts that we can rely on and turn to, and you are definitely one of those people. And thank you so much for being here today.
Shawna Bruce: Thank you.
Michelle Garrett: I’ll be back on May 5th. We’ll be talking about social media, primarily LinkedIn, YouTube, probably with kind of a focus on B2B, PR and social with our guest, Andy Lambert.
So I hope to see you then. Thanks so much for being here. Bye [01:08:00] bye.
About the host: Michelle Garrett is a B2B PR consultant, media relations consultant, writer and author of B2B PR That Gets Results, an Amazon Best Seller. She helps companies create content, earn media coverage, and position themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Michelle’s articles have been featured by Entrepreneur, Content Marketing Institute, Muck Rack, and Ragan’s PR Daily, among others. She’s a frequent speaker on public relations and content. Michelle has been repeatedly ranked among the top ten most influential PR professionals.
Learn more about Michelle’s freelance PR consulting services here. Book a no-obligation call to talk about your needs here. Buy Michelle’s book here.
