<span id="hs_cos_wrapper_name" class="hs_cos_wrapper hs_cos_wrapper_meta_field hs_cos_wrapper_type_text" style="" data-hs-cos-general-type="meta_field" data-hs-cos-type="text" >Telum Talks To: Carolyn Devanayagam and Hin-Yan Wong from Weber Shandwick</span>

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Telum Talks To: Carolyn Devanayagam and Hin-Yan Wong from Weber Shandwick

by Telum Media

27 August 2025 4:25 AM

7 mins read

In an era of increasingly erratic, escalating natural disasters, a solid and up-to-date crisis communications plan is critical in facilitating information transparency, stakeholder support, and reputation protection. Analytics and intelligence can further help strengthen comms during these high-stakes situations.

To explore the complexities around natural disaster comms responses, Telum Media spoke with Weber Shandwick's Carolyn Devanayagam, EVP, Head of Weber Advisory, APAC, and Hin-Yan Wong, EVP, Strategic Planning and Head, APAC Intelligence, to hear about best practices and the importance of data analytics in speedy, accurate, and human-centric crisis comms.

For organisations that don't yet have crisis communications plans in place for natural disasters, where should they begin?

Carolyn: In today's fast-paced information landscape, organisations must have crisis communications frameworks in place, especially in anticipation of natural disasters. Crises can emerge unexpectedly, and the speed of information transfer means organisations must be ready.

Start with a thorough risk assessment to identify natural disaster scenarios specific to your organisation's operational regions. This includes considering geographical vulnerabilities, historical disaster trends, and socio-political landscapes.

Checklist items at the Weber Advisory team include:

Stakeholder mapping: Identifying key internal and external stakeholders, such as employees, customers, government agencies, and the media.
Communication protocols: Establishing clear channels and protocols for effective information dissemination during crises.
Media training: Preparing spokespersons to ensure consistent and authoritative messaging.
Scenario planning: Conducting simulations of disaster scenarios to assess and improve the crisis plan's effectiveness.
Once established, these plans must be regularly reviewed and updated annually to keep pace with evolving risks and organisational changes.

What are the key principles for maintaining transparent comms and public trust during disasters, especially when information is limited, evolving, or at a standstill?

Carolyn: Transparent comms are absolutely critical. Communicators must ensure that they're providing:

Timely and accurate information: Provide regular updates, even when information is limited. Acknowledge uncertainties and commit to offering updates as new information emerges.
Consistent messaging: Ensure all comms channels deliver a unified message, preventing confusion and misinformation.
Empathy and reassurance: Demonstrate understanding and compassion for those affected, using language that conveys solidarity and concern.
Proactive engagement: Engage actively with stakeholders through various channels - social media, press releases, and community outreach - to address concerns and provide support.
For more effective strategic decision-making and stakeholder management, organisations can also implement comprehensive tracking methods, particularly within the first 48 hours of a crisis strike.

Analytics and intelligence can shape effective disaster comms - how can this support comms teams in real-time decision-making?

Hin-Yan: Real-time data from analytics and intelligence can help communicators respond quickly, accurately, and in a way that resonates with affected communities.

The first hours of a disaster are critical, and understanding public sentiment is paramount. Advanced analytics can track social media conversations, news coverage, and community reactions and gauge public sentiment in real-time. With data, comms teams can better adapt their messaging to either calm fears or provide urgent updates. For example, analytics can help identify sudden spikes in misinformation or panic early, allowing communicators to swiftly correct false narratives.

Analytics on audience behaviours, preferences, and regional sensitivities can also enable more targeted and culturally appropriate messages. In APAC, where cultural and language diversity is key, leveraging intelligence to craft region-specific messages can improve engagement and trust. Our A+I team uses audience segmentation models to understand different community needs and ensure relevant and empathetic messaging.

Analytics is also helpful for anticipating how a disaster may evolve so comms teams can prepare messaging strategies in advance, rather than reacting in a piecemeal manner. By analysing patterns from previous similar disasters, we can predict potential hotspots of concern or areas where misinformation might spread and proactively address issues before they escalate.

Lastly, A+I tools can monitor news cycles, social media, and governmental updates in real-time, which has helped our global teams remain agile through crises, ensuring that comms are aligned with the latest developments and that the right stakeholders are reached promptly.

How does predictive analytics help comms leaders prepare for post-disaster reputational risks, such as misinformation or stakeholder backlash?

Hin-Yan: By leveraging historical data, social media trends, and sentiment analysis, predictive analytics can help communicators foresee potential reputational challenges and develop proactive strategies to mitigate them.

One of the most significant post-disaster challenges is the rapid spread of misinformation, particularly on social media. Predictive analytics can model the likely trajectory of false narratives based on historical data from previous crises. By identifying emerging patterns in online discourse, comms teams can prepare to address misinformation before it spirals out of control.

These tools can also analyse sentiment trends across stakeholder groups. This data can help gauge how different segments of the public, the media, and key influencers might react to the disaster response, so leaders can prioritise communication efforts towards at-risk groups and manage emerging concerns proactively.

Predictive planning can also address reputational risks through mapping crisis scenarios that simulate how different responses or crises might impact reputation. Comms leaders can test different messaging approaches through data models to see which strategies can better mitigate reputational risks and maximise public trust. This proactive planning prepares organisations for different outcomes and reduces the need for reactive damage control.

Lastly, predictive analytics helps identify vulnerable stakeholder groups by segmenting key stakeholders - such as customers, investors, or local communities - based on their potential exposure to the crisis. By identifying those most likely to feel the impact of the disaster response or perceive a lack of transparency, comms teams can engage with them directly and offer tailored reassurance, ultimately safeguarding reputation.

Real-time data and predictive models keep crisis communications reactive and strategically anticipatory to protect client reputation in the face of unforeseen challenges.

What role does post-disaster comms play in rebuilding trust, demonstrating accountability, and supporting long-term recovery?

Carolyn and Hin-Yan: Post-disaster communications are vital in rebuilding trust and supporting long-term recovery. This includes:

Transparency and accountability: Clearly communicating the steps taken to address the disaster's impact, including any shortcomings and corrective actions implemented.
Continuous engagement: Maintaining open lines of communication with affected communities, providing updates on recovery efforts and timelines.
Supportive messaging: Using messaging that acknowledges the emotional toll of the disaster and offering support and resources to those affected.
Post-disaster communications should be an integrated approach that combines emotional intelligence with data insights to create compassionate and informative communications.

While employing data to inform recovery strategies and measure progress, communicators should also recognise the emotional impact that natural disasters have on individuals and communities and communicate with sensitivity and compassion.

What metrics matter most when evaluating disaster communications responses? How can these insights be used to strengthen future preparedness and response?

Hin-Yan: There are several key metrics that can help determine the efficacy of a disaster response.

The first is reach and engagement. Tracking how many people received and interacted with a message allows practitioners to gauge its effectiveness across channels and refine how future messages are crafted.

Equally important is sentiment analysis, which draws on social media conversations and media coverage to gauge public reaction to the response. These insights can help guide tone and content adjustments, while media coverage data can help identify effective channels.

Stakeholder feedback from customers, employees, and government representatives offers another valuable perspective, helping measure levels of trust and satisfaction.

Crisis resolution time is also critical, revealing how quickly issues were addressed and misinformation corrected. This highlights where operational processes could be improved.

Finally, assessing media coverage and PR outcomes - both the quantity and tone - provides insight into the overall impact of the messaging.

Together, these measures can directly inform future strategy, strengthening an organisation's preparedness and resilience for the next crisis.

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The Earned View

The hidden cost of seeing risk everywhere

There is a particular psychological condition that develops in senior communications leaders over time, and nobody talks about it because it looks too much like competence.

It rarely appears in job descriptions or competency frameworks. But it quietly shapes how organisations think, behave, make decisions, as well as how we think about ourselves.

Our profession trains us to anticipate failure. We are taught, often implicitly and through hard experience, to read the room before the room knows it has a temperature. To feel the tremor before the quake. But the organisations we serve still need us to be capable of belief, momentum and possibility, and somewhere in the gap between those two truths, a lot of us have quietly lost our footing.

The competency nobody questions

Modern communications leadership has always revolved around institutional threat interpretation.

What if this leaks?
What if this offends people?
What if activists organise around it?
What if the media reframes it in ways we cannot control?

For senior communicators, this kind of thinking is not paranoia. It is a core competence, and in many ways, it has rightly been rewarded as such.

But there is a point at which healthy vigilance begins to distort institutional behaviour in ways that are difficult to see from the inside, because from the inside it still looks like diligence.

Spun out

Institutional trust was already eroding before many of us arrived at the table. The scepticism was real, the scrutiny was justified, and the pressure on organisations to protect themselves from an increasingly unforgiving public environment was entirely understandable. But as the Edelman Trust Barometer continues its steady annual decline, I sometimes wonder how much of that erosion we have since built ourselves. Whether the old art of spin has, quietly and over time, spun the web we now find ourselves increasingly caught in.

We are what we rehearse

Ultimately, organisations become what they rehearse. And organisations that rehearse fear long enough eventually struggle to distinguish discomfort from danger, criticism from crisis, and the raised eyebrow from the burning building.

I want to be honest here: I don’t have clean answers to this, and I’m not writing from the outside looking in. I have been and continue to be rewarded for exactly this kind of thinking, incentivised to find the risk, name the threat, and walk into rooms as the person who could see what others couldn’t. I understand its seductiveness, because it works. It earns us a seat at the table in a way that few other professional postures do, and that feeling of being genuinely useful to leaders navigating real pressure is one of the main reasons I get up to go to work.

Which is perhaps why it is so difficult to notice when the thing that made us valuable has begun to make us and the organisations we serve, smaller.

The case for genuine accountability

When avoiding exposure becomes the primary organisational reflex, accountability starts to erode. Not through any conscious decision to evade responsibility, but because genuine accountability requires a willingness to be clearly and publicly wrong, and clarity has become precisely what these organisations fear most.

What emerges instead is the language of accountability without its substance: acknowledgement without admission, review without consequence, apology without change.

Into that vacuum our profession has enthusiastically poured the concept of authenticity. We have advised organisations to be more human, more genuine, more real. And they have listened, briefed agencies, approved strategies, and published content that performs authenticity with considerable production value while remaining perfectly, carefully, and strategically safe. Which is not authenticity at all. It is its most sophisticated impersonation, and audiences know the difference in their bones even when they struggle to articulate it.

The result is not dramatic scandal. It is something slower and more damaging: campaigns that lose their personality through endless risk management until what remains is technically inoffensive and completely forgettable, public statements nobody inside actually believes and nobody outside actually trusts, and organisations so focused on avoiding negative attention that they have been stripped of the distinctiveness that made them worth paying attention to in the first place.

It doesn’t happen often, and most leaders we work with are genuinely trying to do the right thing in genuinely difficult environments. But we recognise it when it does. Those moments when the organisation is so focused on managing the perception of a decision that the decision itself becomes secondary, and we are brought in to help bridge that gap rather than to challenge it. It is a role that can flatter our craft while quietly diminishing our purpose, and most of us who have been in this profession long enough have felt that tension from the inside.

Us at our best

Our role is not to eliminate risk from institutions. That is impossible, and the pursuit of it is its own kind of damage. Our role is to help organisations navigate uncertainty without becoming psychologically captive to it, and sometimes that means being the person in the room who says that the greater risk is not the one everyone is currently afraid of.

That takes judgement, perspective and the kind of confidence that comes not from certainty, but from experience. And it is, I think, the most valuable thing our profession has to offer when we are at our best.

An organisation that optimises exclusively for reputational safety may well protect itself from backlash.

But it will also, quietly and incrementally, protect itself from relevance.

Matthew (Matt) Thomas is Founder and Chief Catalyst at Stake: The Reputation Company, a Melbourne-based consultancy working across brand, reputation, communications, and public affairs. He has advised some of Australia’s largest private companies and has worked extensively with global organisations localising their storytelling and narratives for Australian audiences. His experience spans consumer, government, health, infrastructure, technology, and corporate reputation, including advisory work at all levels of government in Australia.

Matt’s work sits at the intersection of communications, behaviour change, and institutional strategy. He is also a contributor to the The Oxford Handbook of Social Purpose, writing on reputation, legitimacy, and the growing gap between organisational messaging and operational reality.

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Welcome to The Earned View

Telum Media is all about creating connections between journalists and PR / comms practitioners. Key to that are the connections we forge with media outlets and newsroom leaders on the ground in each of our markets, and with PR leaders and industry bodies.

Today we launch The Earned View - a curated collection of senior industry figures, sharp operators, and KOLs from across the Middle East and Asia Pacific, who have earned the right to pen regular columns on their chosen areas of expertise.

From Acorn Strategy’s Kate Midttun in Dubai to The Savage Company’s Chris Savage in Australia, Ashbury Communications’ Adam Harper in Singapore to PRINZ CEO Susanne Martin in New Zealand, each of our 12 columnists will bring a thought-provoking mix of analysis, opinion, and practical advice to Telum Media’s PR News pages.

We kick things off with Matt Thomas, Founder and Chief Catalyst of Stake: The Reputation Company, writing on the hidden cost of risk in his strategic communications and reputation column.

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