The reignition of the BLM movement has placed a spotlight on brand communications approaches that fail to match words to company actions. Participants will take part in a candid discussion of communications as it applies to meaningful actions taken at their companies to move diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives forward.

We’ll discuss approaches to setting the story straight when your brand or executive is in the crosshairs due to false or misleading information.

This roundtable will explore best practices for staffing, planning and coordination at large companies or organizations with an international footprint. In addition, we’ll discuss which scenarios are best handled by an external consultant or agency, vs. in-house.

PR pros have long been asked to work on shoestring budgets, but recent economic fallout has downsized departments in many organizations, particularly within marketing and communications functions. Participants will share how they are coping, doing more with less and triaging communications in crisis moments.

Beyond managing a crisis, it’s crucial to measure how effective your strategy was before the next crisis hits. From reputation scores to business outcomes, come ready to share your team’s KPIs and measurement challenges.

Roundtable participants will share examples of being dragged into a crisis by association, exploring how to approach crises when they don’t originate at your company.

How would your team handle the fallout from a PR misstep of an executive or employee? Practice planning a response that minimizes reputational damage while communicating with stakeholders in real time.

Participants will manage a simulated social media feed as a multi-layered crisis plays out, navigating the murky waters of politicized public comment.

In this keynote session, Southwest’s Linda Rutherford shares her company’s communications journey over the course of the pandemic, drawing on her decades of crisis management expertise. Learn how a brand long known for consumer satisfaction handled messaging to the public as the airline industry’s historic crisis unfolded.

What constitutes a social media crisis for your organization, and how do you monitor social feeds to determine the severity of the problem? We offer insights on risk assessment, as well as tactics for flipping the script when your brand finds itself in the crosshairs.

Setting up a well-prepared and equipped war room can be the key to a coordinated and successful crisis response strategy. Drawing on her experience navigating large-scale crises, Chicago Navy Pier’s Director of Communications Payal Patel offers tools, tactics and resources that should be in every crisis manager’s arsenal.

Hilton’s vice president of global corporate communications Nigel Glennie will share how his executives navigated the global pandemic and the worst year in the company’s 101-year history. Learn how the company set its communications strategy and stayed close to team members, hotel owners, policymakers and consumers.

COVID-19 has turned traditional crisis planning on its head. Even organizations equipped with solid emergency plans did not foresee the impact the pandemic would have on health care, the economy or the public’s perception of civil liberties. How has Canada’s largest city and economic engine responded to COVID-19? City of Toronto CCO Brad Ross shares takeaways from his team’s recent and ongoing crisis communications odyssey.

Corporate communicators have been challenged by successive economic, social and political crises over the past year, requiring clear, consistent and principled communications on issues that the country had never faced and that communicators had hardly contemplated. Erin Streeter will discuss how the National Association of Manufacturers led on these issues through a forward-thinking communications strategy and what she learned in the process.

Hear how USPS uses social intelligence for crisis mitigation and better customer experience, from natural disasters to efforts surrounding COVID-19.

As recent history has shown, companies that don’t take diversity, equity and inclusion seriously internally face serious external consequences. In this session, learn how PR pros can work to recognize and communicate biases inside their organizations and apply DEI principles to external messaging in a way that is both truthful and impactful.

During a communications crisis, how do you hit pause on business-as-usual messaging, while still advancing longer term PR goals? Our panelists discuss.

There’s no question that some brands emerge from communications crises more scarred than others. In this closing panel, our industry experts offer best practices for winning back brand loyalists and benchmarking public sentiment as your organization bounces back.