Stakeholder Communication During Crisis

Not All Stakeholders Are Equal

During a crisis, the instinct is to broadcast a single message to everyone. This is almost always wrong. Different stakeholders have different information needs, different levels of vulnerability, different communication preferences, and different power to help or hinder your response.

The Mendelow stakeholder matrix maps stakeholders along two dimensions: power (their ability to influence your crisis response) and interest (how directly the crisis affects them). This produces four quadrants:

• High power, high interest — Key players who need detailed, frequent communication (regulators, major customers, board members). Manage closely.
• High power, low interest — Stakeholders who could become involved if mismanaged (government officials, industry associations). Keep satisfied with proactive updates.
• Low power, high interest — Those directly affected but with limited institutional influence (employees, local community members). Keep informed with empathy and transparency.
• Low power, low interest — General public and peripheral stakeholders. Monitor, but do not over-invest communication resources here.

The mistake most organizations make is spending their communication effort on the general public (through media) while neglecting employees and regulators, who have both higher stakes and greater ability to affect the outcome.

Employees First: The Internal Communication Imperative

In virtually every crisis, employees should hear from leadership before or simultaneously with external audiences. When employees learn about their own organization's crisis from the news, trust collapses. They feel disrespected, anxious, and disloyal — and they become a source of leaks and negative commentary.

Marriott International's response to the 2018 Starwood data breach (affecting 500 million guest records) included an immediate internal communication campaign. CEO Arne Sorenson recorded a video for all employees within hours, explaining what happened, what the company was doing, and what employees should say if asked by guests. This served a dual purpose: it preserved employee morale and turned 177,000 employees into consistent messengers rather than confused, freelancing communicators.

The principles of internal crisis communication are: communicate early (before external announcements), communicate honestly (employees detect corporate spin instantly), communicate what it means for them (job security, operational changes), and give them a role (what they should do, what they should say). Employees who understand the crisis and their part in resolving it become your most powerful response asset.

Communicating with Affected Communities

The hardest stakeholder communication is with the people directly harmed by a crisis. They are frightened, angry, and often grieving. Technical accuracy matters far less to them than empathy, honesty, and agency.

Risk communication researcher Peter Sandman identifies a critical distinction: hazard (the technical risk) versus outrage (the emotional response). When outrage is high — as it always is for affected communities — addressing the emotion is more important than explaining the data. A community near a chemical spill does not want to hear that benzene levels are within EPA thresholds. They want to know: is my family safe, who is responsible, and what are you going to do about it?

Best practices for community communication include: hold town halls where people can speak and be heard (not just listen to presentations), provide actionable information (where to go, what to do, how to get help), designate a community liaison who is accessible and consistent, and follow through on every commitment. The Grenfell Tower fire in London (2017) became a political crisis partly because the affected community — largely low-income residents — felt that authorities communicated at them rather than with them, prioritizing institutional messaging over genuine human engagement.