Excelling in Crisis Handling: How Freelancers Are Effective In Planning and Surveillance

Introduction

None of us awakens in the midst of the night, desiring to confront an emergency. As freelancers, the truth is that we play a crucial role in resolving crises encountered by our organizations. Whether they're human-caused, natural, or related to reputation, freelancers are essential in any crisis scenario within your company or the organizations you assist. Many freelancers invest significant time in planning and preparing for various situations.

In this piece, we are emphasizing two primary methods we can employ to get ready. By structuring our teams and surveilling for potential crises, we can ready ourselves and ensure our response strategies are more effective for the organizations we serve. 

Structuring For an Emerging Crisis

There are pragmatic organizational approaches to handling crises. The most effective one we've discovered is distributing crisis management responsibilities across the freelancers' team rather than centralizing them in one unit. 

Initially, when we devised the organizational framework for the marketing and freelancers team, we followed a conventional route. We initially segmented them by function, with crisis freelancers as a distinct team—although today, they are functionally separated, the boundaries are highly fluid.

By assigning existing team members to monitoring and response duties, you broaden the scope to detect brewing crises and have more manpower to address them. And there's a simple rationale for organizing in this manner. None of the other marketing freelancer's functions operate effectively when there's a crisis brewing within your team—so much hinges on unfolding events.

Surveillance

Regarding surveillance, every member of your team (including external consultants) can and should monitor wherever possible. Various tools are available to aid you, and their costs vary. External firms can also be contracted for monitoring purposes. The key is to find a solution that aligns well with your team's capabilities and budget.

Some features to seek in surveillance include:

• Geofencing capabilities for organizations with dispersed geographical presence: This enables you to focus on information relevant to a specific area.

• Real-time notifications and alerts, delivered via text or email: Crucially, they should be distributed to more than one individual on your team. Similarly, every team member should be empowered to notify as many designated individuals as outlined in your crisis plan.

• Standard, ongoing monitoring parameters: You understand your organization and what you need to watch for, so ensure you can input those search terms or provide your teams with the same terms and activities.

Conclusion

This is essentially akin to the routine tasks undertaken by freelancers daily. They tackle problems by comprehending intricate matters swiftly and skillfully, drawing upon our experience and expertise. 

If you are in need of freelancers - individuals or a team - for any crisis management, head over to ZoopUp to find the perfect fit for you.