Many of our clients are being forced into crisis mode as a result of COVID-19.

A big part of that crisis response plan is figuring out how to quickly shift their business and operations to 100% online, digital, and remote.

To help those of you looking for immediate direction and a quick reaction plan, here our Emergency Digital Response to COVID-19 checklist.

(If you need extra hands or help in formulating your response, just contact us)

1. Make sure your website ready for a surge. There’s an excellent possibility that your website is about to experience exponential more traffic than it has ever had to support. Immediately contact your agency or web hosting service provider and ensure they can dynamically scale your service to support whatever level you need any surge. Once you’re assured that you have reliable and stable web hosting, move up the stack to ensure that your web platform or content management system can perform for your new visitors – fast, mobile-optimized, and clear navigation and experiences. You need to have a web design that can serve your customers with entirely online.
2. Create a landing page to communicate your response and sustainable approach to serving your clients. This page should be fully transparent in communicating internal processes and how you are making decisions. For the foreseeable future, this should be an actively managed and updated page. Finally, ensure that there is a clear call to action encouraging your web visitors to ask you questions and then be hyper-responsive to those inquiries. Here are a few strong examples: Our own COVID-19 Response page, a large church that is going 100% digital starting this Sunday.
3. Swiftly communicate how you are changing operations. If you are canceling in-person events or shifting products and services to digital form, announce those details on every channel (email, website, social media, brick, and mortar, etc.)
4. Create a talking points memo for your communications team. This document should clearly outline your company position in the current crisis. What are you doing, what will change, how you will sustain services through the crisis, and the current protocol for resuming “normal” operations. Also included in this document information on how to educate people on the broader COVID-19 issue. Provide a list of trustworthy resources (CDC and WHO) to enable your communications team to give appropriate referrals to customers.
5. Actively monitor social media channels for questions, comments, and negativity. Your social media channels are most likely going to be your frontline for communicating with customers. Your customers are likely to come here first and engage you with questions and comments. When it comes to responding to negative comments, you must go case-by-case. If a comment is claiming incorrect information, use it as an opportunity to educate and inform of proper measures being taken.
6. Get your clients connected to you and your organization. Take this opportunity to educate customers about the best ways to communicate with you and your organization. Ask customers through all of your channels to follow you on Facebook, subscribe to your email list, or subscribe to your text messages so that they can get the latest news and information from your organization and easily communicate with you.
7. Creatively think through how to convert experiences, events, and operations to 100% digital experiences. Most of you are already doing a lot of things digitally. Begin to think about how you can extend those digital activities into other areas – events and experiences.

We will continue to update and expand this page, so go ahead and bookmark it.

However, also feel free to reach out to us with questions and support.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash