In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, everyone is getting a flood of emails about response plans and recommendations as the pandemic sweeps across the U.S.

To determine best practices for crafting an effective email in a crisis, Culp and Johnson analyzed 100 COVID-19 related emails from companies.

With information overload from organizations and media, a strategically penned email is critical in setting an effective first impression in crisis response. The note – like all crisis and issues communications – needs to reflect four critical elements: empathy, actions, cooperative efforts, and resolve.

Political organizations, much like corporations, have invested interests in the core functions of public relations: image, reputation, and expectation management. As true for political public relations as it is for corporate public relations and public interest communications, unexpected crises arise more often than would be desirable.

With COVID-19, what began as a national health emergency in China quickly became an international health epidemic posing a viable threat to the global human population, and increasingly, the world economy. Homing in on the United States, one state has risen to the forefront in governmental response to the pandemic, Ohio.

Learn the four key findings from Ohio's crisis response and the model developed for efficient and effective communication behavior in a time of crisis.

This blog post, written by Dr. Terry Flynn and Tim Li, is provided by the IPR Behavioral Insights Research Center. T  his post was originally published on December 3, 2019.

Research indicates that people find disease outbreaks to be more severe when they learn about it in news that uses emotional writing and images.

The authors presented participants with different versions of a news story describing a fictional disease outbreak, which varied the severity of the disease by altering the symptoms and likelihood of fatality to test the perception of severity and vulnerability.

Learn what health communication and public relations practitioners should take into account when presenting news using emotional messaging about health risks.