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Melissa Agnes      

Reputation Management & Brand Protection Expert, Author of "Crisis Ready," Leading Authority on Crisis Preparedness & Lecturer

Founder and CEO of the Crisis Ready Institute, Melissa Agnes is a recognized leading authority on crisis preparedness, reputation management, and brand protection. Agnes is the creator of the Crisis Ready® Model and author of "Crisis Ready: Building an Invincible Brand in an Uncertain World." She is a coveted speaker, commentator, and advisor to some of today's leading organizations faced with the greatest risks.

As a strategic advisor and keynote speaker, Melissa Agnes has worked with NATO, Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense, financial firms, technology companies, healthcare organizations, cities and municipalities, law enforcement agencies, global non-profits, and many others, helping them understand risk and build invincible brands that can withstand even the most devastating of events. Agnes differentiates critical strategies for managing issues versus crises, providing actionable insights for enhancing organizational resilience.

A university guest lecturer, Agnes teaches crisis management in university courses around the world, including at NYU, Columbia, and McGill. Her book and Crisis Ready® Model are globally recognized as having elevated industry best practice and are currently taught in dozens of higher education courses around the world, including at Harvard University. She also delivers keynote presentations on various topics related to crisis management, such as crisis communication, leadership, and building an invincible brand.

Agnes is proud to sit on the Police Professional Standards, Ethics and Image Committee for the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP); she sat on the panel tasked with developing the International Standard for Crisis Management— Guidelines for developing a strategic capability, ISO 22361; and she is a member of the Global Advisory Council for The Institute for Strategic Risk Management (ISRM), an entity established to help world leaders understand, evaluate, and strategically prepare for rising global risks.

In 2015, Agnes gave a TEDx talk in Los Angeles where she discussed the secret to successful crisis management in the 21st century. She is also the editor of the Crisis Ready Blog, the host of the Invincible Brand Podcast, a contributor to Forbes, and a go-to source for the press, with recent coverage including the Wall Street Journal, VIBE Magazine, USA Today, and many others.

Speech Topics

Building an Invincible Brand

Bad things happen to good companies, and issues come in all sort of sizes.

The potential risks in modern-day business are greater, more dynamic, and less predictable than ever before. And yet, the greatest exposure does not lie within these risks. Rather, it lies in having a team that is not prepared to anticipate, foresee, or respond to a rising threat, and its impact on your reputation, revenue, and relationships in real-time.

If a negative situation were to strike your organization, how confident do you feel that your entire team would know precisely what to do? Would they know how to immediately and effectively manage the situation in a way that results in increased stakeholder trust and loyalty?

In this program, Melissa Agnes, provides an applicable roadmap for helping you build an invincible brand through effective communication, issue management, and crisis readiness, resulting in increased organizational trust, credibility, and goodwill.

In this session, you will:

  • Prepare for what you need to expect, deal with, and overcome when things go wrong
  • Learn ways to exceed stakeholder expectations when it matters most
  • Discover techniques to empower your team to make smart decisions that are focused on stakeholder-experience and relationship-strengthening
  • Identify the difference between an issue and a crisis, and respond appropriately in real-time
  • Discover the roadmap to brand invincibility

Choosing Your Lens: Transforming Issues into Opportunities

Issue management is a part of every business -- whether it’s a customer complaint, an operational mishap, or worse. The lens through which your team chooses to see a negative event directly impacts the actions they take in response to that event, which also directly impacts the result that that event will have on your brand. Furthermore, when a negative event strikes your organization, your team has one of two options available to them: Respond ineffectively and chip away at the brand’s trust and credibility over time, or respond effectively and make strong deposits into your brand’s bank of stakeholder goodwill.

As a crisis management advisor, Melissa helped to successfully manage several, real-world viral issues. This program will examine those issues and:

  • Discusses the powerful advantages of effective, daily issue management in support of the brand’s longstanding reputation
  • Helps participants clearly define the difference between an “issue” and a “crisis”, in order to establish effective strategies for real-time response
  • Demonstrates techniques for auditing the organization’s current mindset to identify unique ways to empower and reward the right lens in every situation
  • Provides best practices for effectively responding to viral issues in real-time, in a way that increases trust and credibility for the brand
  • How can you empower your team to transform every issue into an opportunity to build trust, credibility, and goodwill in the organization?

This seminar will give your participants answers and implementable strategies to ensure the right lens is always chosen – inspiring the right actions to transform any business issue into a powerful brand opportunity.

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