Your brief
A mid-sized municipality wanted to professionalise crisis communications. Incidents (flooding, power cuts, digital outages) led to fragmented messaging across departments and channels.
Communications advisers and the executive board asked for one integrated plan: who says what, when, via which channel — and how to embed that in the organisation?
Collaboration
A Content & Media Strategy master's student conducted in-depth interviews with communications, safety, legal affairs and two councillors. The team also analysed international best practices and crisis plans from comparable municipalities.
The plan included:
- Scenarios for three crisis types (natural, technical, reputation)
- Roles and responsibilities matrix (RACI)
- Channel strategy (website, social, press, citizen alert systems)
- Exercise programme and governance proposal for annual review
During the semester the student presented to the executive board; feedback was incorporated in the final version.
In practice
Research, production and delivery moments — authentic material from the semester collaboration.
What it delivered
The plan was implemented in a pilot (flooding scenario) and evaluated with a tabletop exercise. The municipality adopted the governance proposal: annual review and a fixed crisis team composition.
The document serves as a reference for other municipalities in the region; the student was invited as a guest lecturer for a crisis communications masterclass.
