College athletes are returning to campus to prepare for their fall season, and with that comes an array of questions about how athletic departments are coping with life in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic. What are the school’s testing protocols, how clean are their facilities and what happens when an athlete tests positive? Those are all questions a coach better be prepared to answer with as much confidence as who his starting quarterback will be. Carrie Cecil of Anachel Communications, a veteran crisis communications expert, has been asking her clients in the college space how well they’re prepared to explain operational changes related to COVID-19. She was underwhelmed by the response, so she developed a communications guide for universities to use on occasions when they talk about COVID. Cecil describes it as a resource for communicating protocols in a way that makes constituents feel safe while also protecting the school’s brand. She’s offering the guide for free. It can be downloaded from her firm’s website, anachel.com. “A lot of schools just aren’t equipped to handle it; they don’t have enough people,” Cecil said. “This is a resource that will give them a blueprint of sorts.” Cecil, who has worked with clients such as Auburn, Maryland, Mississippi State, Texas and Washington in the college space, is calling the communications guide S.A.F.E., which stands for Strategic, Accountable, Flexible/Factual and Effective/Efficient.
READY FOR THE UNEXPECTED: New health and safety practices are being developed and deployed, but how and when do schools communicate them, Cecil asks. “Are you prepared to justify operational changes … when the unexpected happens?” Mel Tucker, who is in his first season as Michigan State’s football coach, told THE DAILY that the challenge with COVID-19 is that it doesn’t fit into a traditional crisis communications plan. “It demands constant re-evaluation, flexibility and streamlined ways to distribute information so that it’s digestible to everyone from student-athletes to donors,” Tucker said. “To be able to communicate to multiple verticals, truthfully, pops the bubble on misconceptions or hypotheticals." Anachel also worked with San Jose State on a way to articulate the university’s response plan, “including media best practices and crisis communications guidelines,” said Kenneth Mashinchi, Senior Dir of Media Relations at SJSU. “This focus on efficiently communicating the plan strengthens our response as we work to keep our campus community and stakeholders safe.”
COMMUNICATION IS KEY: Among the internal and external communications items addressed by S.A.F.E.:
- How to form a communications task force
- Creating a crisis emergency action plan
- Who are the designated communicators
- Breaking down the internal silos and eliminating confusion internally from one department to another
- Philosophical and operational messaging in the COVID-19 age
Georgia Southern AD Jared Benko, who worked with Anachel when he was a Deputy AD at Mississippi State, said athletics, with athletes returning, are going through a communications “beta test” before all students return for the fall semester in August. “Things are changing so fast and they’re so fluid that you’ve got to have a communications strategy,” Benko said.
