Freelance Writers and Crisis Managment
February 11, 2008 by Anne Wayman
Filed under Jobs
With talk of terrorism, bird flu, and extreme weather caused by climate change, more and more organizations are developing plans to handle crises. Usually those plans require writing and, in fact, it’s probably possible these days to develop a minor specialty in the area of crisis management.
But even if you don’t want to write about crisis management, you do need to give some consideration to your own business and how you will handle a crisis when it occurs. For the freelancer, a crisis can be anything from an unexpected illness that keeps us from working to weather damage to our home office.
The first thing you need to do is to make a realistic assessment of the kinds of disasters you might be subject to. Some, like epidemics, we have in common; others are unique to our circumstances. For example, I live in southern California. Wild fires and earthquakes are prevalent here. Since I live in an urban area, wildfire is unlikely, but an earthquake is almost certain. My recent move put me fairly close to a riverbed. My hunch is flooding would most likely cut me off physically, but not get me wet, unless its horrendous.
In terms of my business, I’m most vulnerable to power and telephone outages because I do so much through the internet and over the phone. That makes my business dependent on others, just as many organizations are. Last week, I experienced a bit of a problem when the b5 network had an outage that lasted more than 24 hours. Fortunately, they are not my only client. Diversification of my business is important to me.
Beyond that, I’ve got some food and water stored both in my house and in my car… and some pet food too, because MzTiz is important! If the worst happens, I’m fairly well prepared, at least I think I am. We just never know for sure.
How well prepared for a disaster are you?
Write well and often,
Two newsletters:
Abundant Freelance Writing – a resource for freelance writers including 3x a week job postings.
Writing With Vision – for those who want to get a book written.
Speaking of outages, don’t laugh but the most common outage I experience is when our phone/internet cables get stolen. I live in a small town in the Philippines, and this happens A LOT. There are internet cafes nearby that I use for such instances, but it’s so annoying to have service disruptions for weeks or even a month. Also, I get extra business costs by using those internet cafes. I don’t have enough income to get a backup wireless (and less reliable, from what I’ve heard) internet plan from another company. But if I did, I might subscribe to that just as a safety net.
Celine… stolen cables! I’d have never thought of that… sounds like a business opportunity if you can find a source cheap enough… wonder if the $100 laptop folks would be able to help?
http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php – that’s the giving arm, but should lead to the creators
This is such an important topic! Most of us don’t think about crises in terms of how they’d affect our business but with a little extra planning it can eliminate some of the stress.
Yeah… this sort of thing is so easy to ignore.