D649: Crisis Communication

Crisis Communication prepares students for the highest-stakes communication work — planning, message positioning, and coordinated response under real pressure.

What D649 covers

The course prepares students to plan for and manage crisis responses, analyzing the stages of a crisis, creating plans and messages for managing a crisis, and coaching spokespeople to deliver appropriate messages across multiple channels.

Through a crisis communication simulation, students explore establishing and maintaining message positioning, fostering relationships with news/media agencies, and building stakeholder trust, creating internal and external crisis response plans for coordinated, unified messaging.

The D649 performance assessment

Expect a performance assessment requiring you to develop a crisis communication plan for a given crisis scenario, including message positioning and multichannel delivery.

Key topics in D649

• Stages of a crisis
• Crisis response planning
• Message positioning
• Media relations and stakeholder trust

Writing tips for D649

Follow the task instructions and rubric line by line

WGU performance assessments for D649 are graded against a fixed rubric — every rubric line has to be visibly addressed, usually with a labeled heading that mirrors the rubric language. Skipping a rubric point because it seems minor is the single most common reason a competent submission comes back "Not Yet Competent" for revision.

Ground your work in a specific audience or organization, not generic advice

Courses like D649 typically hand you a specific audience, brand, or organizational scenario and expect your work to genuinely fit that context, not communication/design principles in the abstract. Evaluators check whether your reasoning is grounded in the specific scenario given.

Because WGU is self-paced, don't let "no deadline pressure" become no submission

There's no weekly due date forcing progress, which means procrastination costs more at WGU than at a traditional term-based school — a stalled task can quietly eat weeks of a term. Treat your own target date for the D649 assessment as a real deadline.

Why students seek help with D649

Candidates sometimes address only the initial crisis response and skip the coordinated, unified messaging across channels the course specifically requires — a complete plan addresses the full crisis response cycle.

How GradeEssays helps with D649

Share your crisis scenario and rubric, and your writer will build a coordinated crisis response plan spanning the full response cycle, not just the initial reaction.

Prerequisites and program context

D649 has no listed additional prerequisites.

Related courses