Crisis communication company launches

Jim Anderson: Honesty and transparency were the earmarks of duo's communication strategy at CoxHealth.

Joey Powell: Crisis communication training is valuable insurance in the event of an emergency.

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A duo who refined their crisis communication prowess in the fire of COVID-19 is putting their expertise to work for businesses, nonprofits and individuals.

Throughout the pandemic, Kaitlyn McConnell and Steve Edwards jointly executed a crisis communication strategy for CoxHealth – McConnell as the system director for public relations and Edwards as president and CEO. In April, they announced the launch of McConnell Edwards LLC, a crisis communications consultancy to evaluate and create strategies emphasizing transparent communication during challenging times.

McConnell gives credit to Edwards for coming up with the idea.

“This kind of started evolving last year. We started talking about this idea and that we have this experience, and was there a way that we could help share it? That was sort of the genesis behind it,” she said.

The company will focus on preemptive crisis communications counseling, McConnell said.

That means planning for a crisis in times of relative normalcy so that an organization can mobilize on a dime.

McConnell said training is individualized for each client, involving discussions, mock interviews and drills for curated scenarios. The company recently conducted its first crisis drill as a service it offered free of charge to the Friends of the Zoo not-for-profit organization at Dickerson Park Zoo, where McConnell and Edwards outlined a scenario and showed up with a camera to conduct a mock news conference. Afterwards, they evaluated the exercise, offering suggestions for refining the response.

Edwards said while he had the notion for the new venture, McConnell brings a rare level of communication expertise.

“I mean, I believe she could be the PR person for any Fortune 500 company,” he said.

He recalled a time at CoxHealth when McConnell’s public information office was going to be moved to a different floor from the C-suite, and he put a stop to the plan.

“I don’t think every CEO believes that public relations and marketing should report to them, but I do because it represents essentially a whole employee base,” he said.

That close working relationship became essential during the pandemic, particularly during the early days, McConnell said.

“Especially at the very beginning, Steve would have on his calendar five or six interviews back to back – NPR, CNN, all these national outlets that were really wanting to know about Springfield and what was happening here,” she said. “We tried to share as much as we could.”

The team’s philosophy was not to turn down any requests for interviews.

“We got to meet some pretty famous people,” Edwards said, joking that he still has a lot of prominent media figures in his cellphone contacts.

It was powerful on-the-job training for the consultancy, which will be a part-time venture for both.

The two were together at CoxHealth for the entire six years of McConnell’s tenure there, 2015-2021, with Edwards retiring in 2022 after 31 years.

McConnell runs Ozarks Alive, a local cultural preservation project, while Edwards leads ImagineHealth Consulting LLC, which provides strategic leadership guidance for health care and technology startups nationwide.

Rates for the consultancy’s services vary, with individualized plans based on specific needs of clients, McConnell said. Edwards said for smaller companies without a communications team in place, the pair can even come in and run communications if a crisis arises.

McConnell said startup costs for the venture were minimal. She added that McConnell Edwards is developing a client pipeline, but the company will keep client names confidential.

Pandemic as training ground
As Edwards helmed CoxHealth through the pandemic, he became a familiar voice and face in the media. He said it was an uncomfortable role for someone who swears he is an introvert.

“I always had this perspective that a CEO should try not to get into the limelight. If something good is happening, it’s probably one of your team that made it happen,” Edwards said. “But I made a point to myself years ago that if there’s a crisis – if the organization’s done something really bad, or something bad is happening in the community – that’s when the CEO has to step up.”

And stepping up, during the pandemic, sometimes meant standing in front of a microphone for a national broadcast. Almost daily, it meant telling difficult truths to a worried community.

Like a lot of introverts, Edwards is at home in a book, and he said he found guidance for the COVID-19 pandemic in one: “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic” by John M. Barry. The book chronicles the so-called Spanish flu that originated in 1918 – probably in Kansas, despite the name.

“It was almost a guiding path for us in our response because history repeated itself so much,” he said. “At that time, we saw lots of misinformation. We saw fighting over masks. We saw political fallout, where almost every country lied about their pandemic numbers because they were at war.”

The book concludes that the lies led to many millions more deaths, Edwards said.

“The author’s conclusion was to tell the truth – the unvarnished truth – because people are relying on you for the best information, and it could save lives,” he said. “We really adopted that principle, and it helped.”

Edwards said it makes sense to be transparent anyway, but openness reached a new level for CoxHealth.

 “Our level of transparency was a new thing for us at that level, telling people we have this many beds. We have this many patients. We can handle this much more,” he said. “We were very specific.”

Information, it turned out, was its own kind of vaccine.

“We knew that as a pandemic kind of swept across the world, if we were just months or days ahead of everyone else, we could get ventilators and PPE quicker, and so we watched and had contacts in other places that informed us what was going on,” he said.

“The thought was, if we could learn the truth and respond to it, we would be better equipped to navigate it.”

Learning and communicating the truth is key to responding to a media crisis, Edwards said.

“That’s how Kaitlyn and I think you should respond,” he said. “A media event and a media crisis –  the difference is the truth.”

Jim Anderson, former vice president of public affairs at CoxHealth, said McConnell and Edwards know what they’re talking about.

“They are the absolute best – so professional,” he said, adding, “That gives them instant credibility – certainly with crisis communications, it does.”

Anderson said he saw firsthand how strongly the pair believed in the importance of planning.

“They don’t shoot from the hip very often,” he said. “We had a crisis communication plan, and they worked it. They were flexible, but they never lost sight of the core value of honesty and transparency in communication.”

Practice makes perfect
Joey Powell, public relations and marketing director for the Friends of the Zoo, said Edwards reached out to offer free crisis communication training for the organization.

“Having such experts who are so well trained and willing to share that knowledge is an incredible resource for our community,” she said.

Powell said because the zoo deals with animals, there is always the potential for an emergency, from an animal escape or interaction to an outbreak of avian flu.

“This is insurance,” she said. “We hope we never have to use this, but we have a plan if we do.”

Powell said McConnell and Edwards sent five or six scenarios and asked how her organization would respond and how the chain of command would work.

The crisis drill involved learning about a scenario the previous day and then having a news conference.

“For about a 24-hour time period, it was like being in a crisis situation – we treated it as such,” she said.

The zoo’s veterinarian and senior keepers were present to respond to questions and follow the plan that was mapped out. The plan specified who would need to be involved, how in depth they should go, how social media would be handled and whether to issue a press release or hold a news conference.

Powell said the exercise taught the zoo team how to respond to leaked information, untruths within the realm of the scenario and information that could not yet be released.

They also learned the power of saying, “I don’t know,” and admitting they didn’t have all the answers, especially in a situation where things change quickly.

She added that some staff who were not accustomed to speaking in front of people recognized skills they did not know they had.

“You could see the tension come out of people’s bodies,” she said. “It was like, they’re asking questions I know the answer to – that’s my area of expertise.”