The 9 Steps of Crisis Communications
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Crisis: Any situation that is threatening or could threaten to harm
people or property, seriously interrupt business, significantly damage
reputation and/or negatively impact the bottom line.
Every organization is vulnerable to
crises. The days of playing ostrich are gone. You can play, but your
stakeholders will not be understanding or forgiving because they’ve watched
what happened with Fukishima, Penn State/Sandusky, BP/Deepwater and Wikileaks.
The basic steps of effective crisis
communications are not difficult, but they require advance work in order to
minimize damage. The slower the response, the more damage is incurred. So if
you’re serious about crisis preparedness and response, read and implement these
10 steps of crisis communications, the first seven of which can and should be
undertaken before any crisis occurs.
The 9 Steps of Crisis
Communications
PRE-CRISIS
1. Anticipate Crises
If you’re being proactive and
preparing for crises, gather your Crisis Communications Team for intensive
brainstorming sessions on all the potential crises that could occur at your
organization.
There are at least two immediate
benefits to this exercise:
- You may realize that some of the situations are preventable by simply modifying existing methods of operation.
- You can begin to think about possible responses, about best-case/worst-case scenarios, etc. Better now than when under the pressure of an actual crisis.
2. Identify Your Crisis
Communications Team
A small team of senior executives
should be identified to serve as your organization’s Crisis Communications
Team. Ideally, the organization’s CEO will lead the team, with the firm’s top
public relations executive and legal counsel as his or her chief advisers. If
your in-house PR executive does not have sufficient crisis communications
expertise, he or she may choose to retain an agency or independent consultant
with that specialty. Other team members are typically the heads of your major
organizational divisions, as any situation that rises to the level of being a
crisis will affect your entire organization. And sometimes, the team also needs
to include those with special knowledge related to the current crisis, e.g.,
subject-specific experts.
3. Identify and Train Spokespersons
Categorically, any organization
should ensure, via an appropriate policy and training, that only authorized
spokespersons speak for it, and this is particularly important during a crisis.
Each crisis communications team should have people who have been pre-screened,
and trained, to be the lead and/or backup spokespersons for different channels
of communications.
All organizational spokespersons
during a crisis situation must have:
- The right skills
- The right position
- The right training
4. Spokesperson Training
Two typical quotes from
well-intentioned organization executives summarize the reason why your
spokespersons should receive professional training in how to speak to the
media:
“I talked to that nice reporter for
over an hour and he didn’t use the most important news about my organization.”
“I’ve done a lot of public speaking.
I won’t have any trouble at that public hearing.”
Spokesperson training teaches you to
be prepared, to be ready to respond in a way that optimizes the response of all
stakeholders.
5. Establish Notification and
Monitoring Systems
Notification Systems
Remember when the only way to reach
someone quickly was by a single phone or fax number, assuming they were there
to receive either?
ou would like them to repeat
elsewhere.
7. Develop Holding Statements
While full message development must
await the outbreak of an actual crisis, “holding statements,” messages designed
for use immediately after a crisis breaks, can be developed in advance to be
used for a wide variety of scenarios to which the organization is perceived to
be vulnerable, based on the assessment you conducted in Step 1 of this process.
An example of holding statements by a hotel chain with properties hit by a
natural disaster, before the organization headquarters has any hard factual
information, might be:
“We have implemented our crisis
response plan, which places the highest priority on the health and safety of
our guests and staff.”
“Our hearts and minds are with those
who are in harm’s way, and we hope that they are well.”
“We will be supplying additional
information when it is available and posting it on our website.”
The organization’s Crisis
Communications Team should regularly review holding statements to determine if
they require revision and/or whether statements for other scenarios should be
developed.
POST-CRISIS
8. Assess the Crisis Situation
Reacting without adequate
information is a classic “shoot first and ask questions afterwards” situation
in which you could be the primary victim. However, if you’ve done all of the
above first, it’s a “simple” matter of having the Crisis Communications Team on
the receiving end of information coming in from your team members, ensuring the
right type of information is being provided so you can proceed with determining
the appropriate response.
Assessing the crisis situation is,
therefore, the first crisis communications step you can’t take in advance. If
you haven’t prepared in advance, your reaction will be delayed by the time it
takes your in-house staff or quickly hired consultants to run through steps 1
to 7. Furthermore, a hastily created crisis communications strategy and team
are never as efficient as those planned and rehearsed in advance.
9. Finalize and Adapt Key Messages
With holding statements available as
a starting point, the Crisis Communications Team must continue developing the
crisis-specific messages required for any given situation. The team already
knows, categorically, what type of information its stakeholders are looking
for. What should those stakeholders know about this crisis? Keep it
simple. Have no more than three main messages that go to all stakeholders and,
as necessary, some audience-specific messages for individual groups of
stakeholders.
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