Channel 4
Wednesday, May 7, 2025 3:30 PM (30 Minutes)
As the digital world continues to grow and evolve, it's more pressing than ever for an organization to have concise, consistent and transparent messaging, especially during crises. Poor communication can leave employees, the public and news media feeling frustrated, upset and confused. Studies show that during an incident, information is as critically important to people as food or water. Not only can accurate information mean the difference between life and death, it can provide confidence that response and recovery are being appropriately managed. On its worst day, an organization needs its team of communication professionals to help develop and coordinate its communication efforts.
Realizing this, Idaho National Laboratory has developed a new Emergency Public Information webpage that allows the laboratory's Joint Information Center (JIC) to communicate confirmed, approved information during emergencies faster than ever before in a consolidated place. By using a preapproved template, the page can be readily activated at any time for any type of emergency. It requires no experience with web design or content management systems, making it extremely easy for JIC staff to populate each section with information as it becomes available. The page was recently recognized by the U.S. Department of Energy's Emergency Management Issues Special Interest Group and by Argonne National Laboratory's Public Affairs Science and Technology Fusion Cell Academy as a best practice and something all national laboratories should consider implementing.
We’d love to provide an overview of the webpage and its benefits to the emergency public information community, and hope you’ll consider a walkthrough of the webpage for a presentation at the Emergency Management Symposium in May.
You can access an example version of the webpage here.
Communications during an emergency can be overwhelming. There's a ton of different moving parts associated with responding to a crisis, especially for an organization like Idaho National Laboratory. When an emergency happens at one of our nuclear research facilities, people want to know what kind of emergency it is and how it's being responded to, but often times those questions lead to inquires about the nature of the work that's regularly conducted there, the facilitiy's history, what it looks like and where it's located. An informational webpage that's digestable for the general public provides answers to all of these questions and more.
The webpage acts as a one-stop-shop for all messaging during an emergency, featuring a summary statement, all news releases, an interactive map of INL's facilities and an FAQ section to answer common questions and correct misinformation when needed. Unlike previous iterations, the page was designed with mobile devices in mind, ensuring users have a persistent and responsive experience across mobile and desktop devices. This aspect is especially important, as data shows that the majority of users access information on the internet from their mobile devices.
The webpage also has a marketing friendly URL associated with it (inl.gov/emergency) that can be easily relayed over the phone or on social media, and a site banner with a link to the page is visible on every page on the website once the page is published.
It also houses fact sheets, photo galleries and videos, helping it act as a media kit for reporters, and subsequently eliminating redundant efforts inside of the JIC. The webpage also serves as a guide for JIC staff to know what information has been confirmed and can be communicated to the general public and media, helping ensure INL's messaging is consistent across different positions in the JIC. In particular, the webpage features an FAQ section helps dispel rumors and answer reoccurring questions that media and public inquiry staff are receiving over the phone or the social media monitors are seeing online, providing JIC staff with prewritten responses that they can use as scripts when answering questions.
We've found our JIC staff provides much more consistent responses to questions across social media and over the phone during drills since we began utilizing this new web presence.