News of a major incident can travel around the world within minutes, often before the organisation involved has established exactly what has happened or who may be affected.
For anyone with reason to fear a connection, the uncertainty can begin almost immediately. A family is expecting someone home from a flight. A friend knows someone is travelling in the area. A colleague sees images from a site where people they work with are based. The news tells them something serious has happened but not whether someone they care about is involved.
For those closest to the people potentially affected, that uncertainty is especially acute. They may be searching social media, calling or messaging the person they are concerned about, or trying to reach the organisation at the same time the organisation itself is still establishing the facts.
After Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed in 2019, relatives waiting for passengers at Nairobi airport spent hours seeking information. Some learned that the aircraft had crashed from journalists; one woman waiting for her brother saw news of the crash on Facebook.
That gap between knowing an incident has occurred and receiving reliable information about someone who may be involved is one of the hardest challenges in modern crisis communication.
Organisations can no longer assume they will be the first to tell families that an incident has occurred. News and social media often make that impossible. What they can do is establish themselves quickly as a trusted source, while ensuring that verified personal information reaches families before it is released publicly.
The principle is straightforward: be fast about the event, careful about the facts and families-first with personal information.
Communicate quickly without getting ahead of the facts
Communicate quickly about the event and cautiously about the people involved. The first statement exists to fill the information vacuum with something accurate and human while the facts are still forming. Speed belongs to acknowledging the incident and pointing people to verified information. Caution belongs to cause, casualties and identities, which wait until they are confirmed.
A smartphone video can reach a global audience within seconds. By the time a crisis team assembles, an incident may already have been filmed, shared and subjected to intense speculation.
The organisation cannot prevent that, but it can reduce the information vacuum in which anxiety, rumour and speculation thrive.
The first communication does not need to provide all the answers. It should acknowledge that an incident has occurred, express concern for those affected, confirm that a response is under way and tell people where verified information will be provided.
At that stage, the organisation may not know who was involved, the extent of injuries or casualties, or the cause. It should say so.
Speed matters. Speculation does not help.
Until information has been verified and the appropriate next-of-kin notification has taken place, terms such as "those affected" avoid prematurely confirming casualties or identities.
A first statement that is accurate, human and useful is far better than silence — or a detailed statement that later turns out to be wrong.
Families first does not mean public silence
Families first does not require public silence. Before every family has been notified, an organisation can still acknowledge the incident, share verified information about the event, open its contact channels and explain what it is doing. What it holds back is personal information: the identity or fate of any individual, until the right family has been told first.
Regulators, investigators, emergency services and other authorities may also require immediate or simultaneous notification. Employees and other key stakeholders may need timely information.
There is rarely a simple linear sequence in which one audience is completely notified before communication with another begins. The critical safeguard is that public communication does not overtake family notification when personal information is involved.
When the calls start coming
When people fear a loved one is involved, many will call at once, and an ordinary switchboard can be overwhelmed within minutes. A dedicated family assistance telephone line, staffed by people trained for sensitive conversations, needs to be activated quickly, with media enquiries routed to a separate channel so the two never compete for the same resources.
When Asiana Flight 214 crashed at San Francisco International Airport in 2013, for approximately a day the only telephone number generally available to families was the airline's reservations line. The US Department of Transportation subsequently fined Asiana for failing to adhere to its family assistance plan, including delays in publicising an appropriate family contact number and contacting families.
Those answering family calls need to be trained not only in systems and procedures, but in handling sensitive and often highly emotional conversations. Information should be recorded accurately, commitments tracked and callbacks made as promised, so families do not have to repeatedly explain who they are and why they are calling.
Media enquiries need their own channel. A major incident can generate hundreds of media calls in a short period. A dedicated media call centre staffed by trained personnel, allows the organisation to manage the demand without competing with resources supporting families. It also provides a central point for handling enquiries, providing approved information and maintaining consistency across the response.
Sequence must be designed before the crisis
The order is families and those directly affected first, then employees, then the regulators and authorities that must be informed, and the media and public last. That order is set deliberately before an incident, because under pressure organisations answer whoever is loudest, usually the media, and personal information reaches the public before it reaches the people it concerns.
A stakeholder and notification map should establish who needs to be informed, which notifications must happen immediately or concurrently, what information each audience can receive, who owns each communication and who has authority to approve and activate it.
In regulated industries, roles also need to be clear. The body leading an investigation may be distinct from the regulator, and both may be separate from the organisation's own responsibilities to families.
How you tell families matters
How families are told matters as much as how quickly. Devastating personal information calls for human contact wherever possible, delivered by someone prepared for the conversation. Text messages, email and dedicated websites have a real role in keeping registered families updated during a long response, as a supplement to personal notification and never as a replacement for it.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 remains a powerful example.
Sixteen days after the aircraft disappeared in March 2014, relatives of the passengers and crew received a text message telling them the airline had to assume that the aircraft had been lost and none of those on board had survived.
Malaysia Airlines explained that the text was intended to supplement notifications being made by telephone and in person and to ensure families received the information before the Malaysian Prime Minister made it public.
The intention reaching families before a public announcement was understandable. But the method became part of the story.
Communication is part of the response
Families experience communication and operations as one thing, not two, so communication cannot be treated as something that happens once the response is under control. It belongs inside the response from the start and continues long after the first notification, because a serious incident keeps producing developments that families need to hear about.
If they cannot get through on the telephone, do not know where to go, receive conflicting information or see important developments reported publicly before anyone has spoken to them, those are part of their experience of the organisation's response.
That is why communications must be integrated with operations from the beginning. Decisions about manifests, Family Assistance Centres, passenger information, investigation developments and recovery activities all affect what families need to know and when.
A serious incident may require regular briefings, dedicated family websites, counselling and humanitarian support, travel arrangements, memorial arrangements and communication around investigation milestones. Search and recovery, identification, repatriation and the investigation into the cause can extend for months or even years, requiring continued communication with families as significant developments occur.
Families also need to know when they can expect to hear from the organisation again, including when there is no significant new information. A scheduled update explaining what is known, what remains unknown and when the next communication will come provides some certainty about the process.
Could your plan work at three in the morning?
None of this can be improvised effectively on the day. Organisations need to build and test the capability in advance.
That means having pre-authorised decision-making so an initial acknowledgement and communication channels can be activated quickly; integration between communications, operations and family assistance so teams have access to the information they need; and realistic exercises that test the family assistance line, media call centre, notification process, approvals and alignment between what families and the public are being told.
After exercises and real activations, lessons need to feed back into plans, contact lists, templates, training and procedures.
The most useful test may be the simplest:
Could the people responsible for communicating with families do it in the right way, with the right information and the right care, at three o'clock in the morning with no notice?
If the answer is uncertain, there is work to do before the next crisis.
Where to take this next
News of an incident may reach those with a personal connection long before an organisation can tell them whether someone they care about is involved. That is the reality of smartphones, breaking-news alerts and social media.
But organisations still control something critically important: how quickly they become a credible source, how carefully they handle verified information and how they treat the people most directly affected.
A strong crisis communication capability connects the initial acknowledgement with family notification and assistance, dedicated media response, humanitarian support, stakeholder communication, social media and longer-term family engagement.
The best time to discover the gaps is on a quiet afternoon — not during the first hour of an incident.
Kenyon, the crisis management and response capability of TrustFlight, helps organisations pressure-test their crisis communication and family notification arrangements against realistic scenarios, drawing on more than 120 years of experience across 700+ incidents in 170 countries and a global network of more than 2,500 trained responders.