Stories by Nicole Schuman

On a tough day for Britain, in which Downing Street announced Prime Minister Boris Johnson was admitted into the hospital for complications due to coronavirus, Queen Elizabeth II emerged for a rare address.

You head outside for a run. Your son works as a cashier at the grocery store. You need to take a trip to the pharmacy. You wonder, is a mask necessary?

Brands catering to families and especially children need to remember to tweak their normal methods of communication, particularly for a time of crisis.

Celebrities, politicians, athletes, spouses, healthcare staff and even pets took to social media today to share tributes, successes, joys and pleas to stay inside and help stop the spread of the virus.

This is a time when the public likely won’t mind over-communication as people clamor to learn everything they can to protect themselves and their families. And while every organization has its preferred method of distributing information to its audience, some are turning to podcasts for more comprehensive discussions around necessary information.

This is especially important for TV news networks, where daily viewership continues to rise, with most people at home and many looking for the latest coronavirus information.

The IOC released a joint statement with the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee recapping a conference call held between the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach and the prime minister of Japan, Abe Shinzo. 

To streamline messaging and quickly disburse important updates, the NYC Emergency Management unit is texting.

It’s important to consider multi-lingual messaging, particularly regarding updates during the COVID-19 outbreak, so every constituent knows the latest facts.

As employees adhere to a new world of work during the coronavirus outbreak, they look to employers to provide clear and consistent messaging regarding not only the day-to-day, but what’s coming next. This gives a great responsibility to company leadership and internal communications officers, who balance on a very tense tightrope of trust during these challenging days.