Your school's Crisis Communication Plan

 Your crisis communication plan includes 9 files (see screenshot below). The first one to read is ‘Preparation.’ This explains what you need to do. The remainder of files form your actual plan. You will need to go through the plan, tailoring anything you want to change.

 The most work will be in filling out the Critical Information Lists and assigning roles. Those assigned roles will then have tasks to perform in preparing for a crisis and on crisis day. You may also want to change other documents like ‘Staff Guidelines’ and ‘Plan Objectives.’

It’s important to make your crisis communication plan an official school document. That’s why you will see the requirement for signitures on the Plan Objectives file from the Principal and Board Chair.

It’s important that you have annual ‘desktop drills’. These are where a facilitator comes up with a scenario for the crisis communication team (around the table) to respond to. The facilitator will announce new developments as the scenario develops. This will take one to two hours. It can be done in house, or with Pete Burdon from Media Training NZ either in person or remotely. This is important. It’s no different from a fire drill.

To become the owner of your plan on google drive, you need to do 2 things. Firstly, move it from “Shared with me” on Google Drive to ‘My Drive.’ Then you need to copy the plan I have sent you. Otherwise I remain the owner. Follow the simple instructions in the 2 minute Youtube video at this link.

You can then share the document with anyone at school. One thing I must emphasise is that this plan is for your school only. It cannot be shared with other schools.