Rings of involvement: who do you inform first during a crisis?

What the rings of involvement are

During a crisis the temptation is to start with whoever shouts loudest. Usually that is the press, or an indignant stream on social media. The rings of involvement reverse that order: you arrange your audiences by how far they are actually affected, and you direct your first attention to the innermost ring.

The model has become common currency in Dutch crisis communication and is taught among others by Wouter Jong, assistant professor of crisis communication at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University. Jong took his doctorate in 2019 at Tilburg University on the leadership of mayors during crises, and combines his academic work with crisis management practice. His research into mayors shows that leaders who adopt a serving posture towards those affected, offering practical and emotional support, come through a crisis noticeably better than leaders who mainly defend their own position.

The core of the model in one sentence: media and journalists are never in the innermost ring. That is not contempt for the press but an ordering principle. The press is a channel for reaching people, not an audience whose suffering is central.

The rings set out

How many rings you distinguish varies by organisation and by incident. This division works well in practice.

Ring	Who	What they need
1. Directly affected	Casualties, the injured, patients, customers whose data has leaked, residents who must evacuate	Facts about their own situation, a concrete course of action, a named contact with a phone number
2. Those close to them	Family, next of kin, people they live with	Certainty about their loved one, personal contact, and no information they have to learn from the news first
3. Directly involved	Staff, responders at the scene, witnesses, neighbours	What is happening, what is expected of them, and aftercare; they are also your ambassadors or your leak
4. Involved parties	Partners in the chain, regulators, municipality or safety region, suppliers, insurer	Factual coordination, statutory notifications, clarity on who does what
5. Interested public	The wider public, other residents, followers on social media	Interpretation, context, and the answer to whether they need to do anything themselves
6. Channels	Press and media	Verified information and a reachable spokesperson, so they can serve ring 5 properly

The rings are not a queue in which the outer ring waits until the inner one is finished. Often you communicate to all rings within minutes. The difference lies in order of attention, tone and channel: the innermost ring gets personal contact, the outermost a message on the website.

The rule broken most often

Nobody in an inner ring should learn from the news what you already knew. That sounds obvious and goes wrong regularly, for two reasons.

The first is pace. A press statement is ready faster than a list of phone numbers of those affected. Teams steering on speed end up serving the outermost ring first by accident. The second is pressure. Journalists call and want an answer now; a bereaved relative does not call, because they are waiting. Responding to the loudest voice inverts the model without anyone noticing.

The antidote is organisational rather than communicative: at the start of the crisis, appoint someone responsible solely for the innermost two rings, and give that person the mandate to make media handling wait.

Filling in the rings in practice

Determine three things per ring, and record them before you start writing.

1. Who is in it, concretely. Not "staff" but "the 42 colleagues on the department that was on duty this morning". Vaguely defined rings produce vague messages.
2. What do they already know, and what do they fear? The innermost ring almost always has more information than you think, and at the same time more uncertainty.
3. Through which channel do you reach them, and within what time? Phone and personal contact for rings 1 and 2, internal channels for ring 3, coordination lines for ring 4, website and social media for rings 5 and 6.

Then check one thing: could someone from ring 1 read your public message without feeling overlooked? If not, the tone is wrong, however factual the message may otherwise be.

Rings of involvement and rings of influence

These two get confused. Rings of involvement order audiences by how hard they are hit. Rings of influence order parties by how much say or impact they have on how the situation develops. A regulator has considerable influence but does not sit in the innermost involvement ring; an affected resident sits in the innermost involvement ring but has little formal influence.

You need both, for different decisions: involvement determines who you inform first, influence determines who you coordinate with first.

Dutch and English terminology

Dutch crisis teams mix both languages, particularly in organisations that operate internationally. These terms mean the same thing:

English	Dutch
Rings of involvement	Ringen van betrokkenheid
Inner circle, first ring	Binnenste ring, eerste ring
Directly affected, primary stakeholders	Direct getroffenen
Stakeholder mapping	Doelgroepenanalyse
Situational awareness	Omgevingsbeeld
Actionable guidance	Handelingsperspectief
Sensemaking	Betekenisgeving
Holding statement	Eerste bericht

Where AI helps, and where it does not

AI is useful for populating the rings and for writing per ring, not for deciding who belongs in them.

• Yes: extracting from a situational analysis which questions are live in which group, turning one key message into six variants with the right tone and level of detail, and checking that those variants do not contradict each other.
• Yes: rewriting a message for the outer rings into plain language or translating it, so reach does not cost you time.
• No: determining who is in ring 1. That is a substantive and sometimes legal judgement requiring human knowledge of the situation.
• No: automating communication to rings 1 and 2. Personal contact with someone affected or bereaved is by definition human work; a generated message presented as personal is a risk you do not want to run.

That distinction is the same line this platform keeps returning to: AI speeds up the preparatory work, people decide and carry the responsibility.

Sources

• Wouter Jong, assistant professor, Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University — teaching crisis communication since 2018; doctorate in 2019 at Tilburg University on the leadership of mayors during crises. Accessed 22 September 2026.
• Dutch Association of Mayors (Nederlands Genootschap van Burgemeesters), The mayor as figurehead: crisis communication at the moments that matter (2017, in Dutch).
• Dutch Association of Mayors, Communicating begins with listening (2014, in Dutch).
• Netherlands Institute for Public Safety (NIPV), Crisis communication within crisis management — the three objectives of crisis communication. Accessed 22 September 2026.