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It is important to develop clear guidelines and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to maintain quality and manage risks. In addition to training on core principles and technical expertise, teams should be trained on the guidelines and standard operating procedures you develop.
For information production:
- Information people in crisis need can often be confusing, uncertain, political, sensitive, highly technical, or rapidly changing. It is important that your team and the stakeholders involved have a shared understanding of how you will operate to deliver responsive and useful information with timeliness and while building trust and maintaining quality, even in dynamic and complex information environments.
- Moreover, timeliness is one of the most important factors of a responsive information service, and clear guidelines and planning processes will help ensure you are sharing the information people need when they need it. Timeliness is also important to build trust and engagement with your information service – your audience needs to view your information service as a reliable source.
For service mapping:
- Developing and maintaining a consistent and accurate map of essential services available for crisis-effected communities in the geographic area covered by your responsive information service is crucial to enable you to provide accurate, actionable, up to date information.
- It is important that your team has standard processes for collecting information from service providers, obtaining their documented consent for publishing their information publicly, and organizing that information to be used for content development or in two-way communications.
For frontline communication:
- Unless specifically designed to do so, responsive information services do not provide direct services or case management and are not an appropriate channel for clients to use when they are facing an acute individual emergency. A key part of a ‘do no harm’ approach is to be clear about your limitations so that clients don’t develop expectations you cannot meet. However, even when those limits are clearly communicated, frontline communicators may be contacted by people with immediate and acute needs who need special attention. It is crucial that frontline staff know how to handle these situations effectively and can make appropriate referrals so they do not handle these kinds of cases alone, especially if they do not have appropriate technical protection expertise.
- The questions that clients ask frontline communicators during two-way interactions are the most important data source to drive information production. It is important to develop systems to document information about client interactions, to manage follow-up and to analyze trends in information needs.