What’s working for financial comms during COVID-19

In this new world of “shelter at home” uncertainty, your inbox has probably been flooded with hundreds of updates from businesses about COVID-19.

Among them are messages from investment firms and financial advisors seeking to assure recipients that things are under control. These senders have an even more complex task than most organizations as they must also address financial market drama.

As each day brings news of unprecedented action by the Fed or recovery plans from Congress, followed by the market’s often swift response, anything you said yesterday feels immediately out of date.

Naturally, many would prefer to stop communicating and simply focus on managing the crisis and responding only to clients. But we would argue that there may be opportunities to communicate with the world during difficult times that can be meaningful and helpful in the long run.

Here are a few actions that we see working now:

1. Share the facts.

While we’ve seen nothing like this before, gathering meaningful historical data can help people put today’s crisis into context.

Here’s an example from The Leuthold Group’s Doug Ramsey as quoted by Bloomberg: