How Helping Journalists Decipher Technical Material Can Prevent Negative Stories from Growing into Crises

The majority of stories in this publication feature aspects of crisis readiness or describe how brand communicators act once ensconced in a crisis.

The story below, though, looks at how a communicator prevented an incident that might have grown into a crisis.

As Durée Ross, president and CEO of Durée and Company, can attest, the cannabis and CBD industry presents unique opportunities and challenges for PR pros. One of them is getting sample products to journalists. Obviously, you can’t do that with marijuana.

As such, sometimes journalists order products on their own as they write about the sector. In some cases, they may send products to labs for testing. An added issue is that journalists are doing this on their own, without input from communicators. That means journalists must decipher lab reports on their own, not always an easy task.

The Arcane Nature of Lab Results

In the cannabis/CBD sector, labs typically issue a Certificate of Analysis (COA), a document that verifies details about a product’s ingredients. COAs help interested parties know what ingredients are in cannabis products they are purchasing.