In December, 2022 I found myself sitting in a hotel bar in Almaty, Kazakhstan talking with a friend and colleague who works for the World Health Organization about the importance of building communities of knowledge, practice, and experience to tackle global problems like COVID-19. Practitioners and politicians get the benefit of research-informed decision-making and academics get the benefit of seeing
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Why do businesses choose to invest in the public good? What is it that they get out of it? Well, in the case of companies like Ben and Jerry’s ethical behavior or ‘corporate social responsibility’ was simply a part of the founders’ mission. But there are many global businesses that spend millions social responsibility initiatives, who sponsor charitable causes, or
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Data security breaches are an increasingly common and costly problem for organizations, yet there are critical gaps in our understanding of the role that stakeholder relationship management and crisis communication in relation to data breaches. This research with my colleagues Amelia Symons and Cheng Zeng, which has been published in Corporate Communications: An International Journal provides important insights from a
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Public health practitioners have long known that poor communication during health crises risks lives. This is why the WHO and most national public health agencies invest in risk and crisis communication. However, that does not mean it always is effective. In fact, COVID-19 has provided the opportunity to better understand what can go right and wrong in strategic communication efforts
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When many think about crisis communication, they think about what happens once a crisis emerges and traditional research in the field asks a number of questions like: However, I think this is a limited way of thinking about crisis communication that artificially separates it from the risk and crisis communication cycle, which is something that I talk about in the
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Today’s organization has to manage a lot of different stakeholder relationships. Stakeholders are those groups and/ or individuals who can affect or be affected by a focal organization . These groups form because of an awareness that the focal organization’s activities are relevant to and perhaps changeable by the group. But, not all stakeholders are created equal. Not all stakeholders need
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Audra Diers-Lawson 