Those of you who follow me on social media may know that I proudly lead the Midlands arm of CharityComms.
CharityComms is a charity itself which is essentially a membership organisation for those working in a comms role in a UK charity or not-for-profit organisation. I love leading the Midlands group. We have a huge variety of small and large charities represented by press officers, social media assistants, marketing managers, fundraisers and everyone in between.
We held our last event in October, and it covered crisis comms. We had three fabulous speakers from two organisations sharing their experiences, followed by activities where we drew on the delegates’ vast knowledge and discussed ideas and obstacles to creating a plan.
I picked up some tips on the day which can be applied to any business, so I thought it might be useful to share them.
What is a crisis? A crisis is an event which could cause harm to the reputation or viability of your business. Crises can’t always be avoided, but you can manage them to limit any damage caused and to prevent small issues from becoming catastrophes.
What is a crisis comms plan? A crisis comms plan is a set of guidelines outlining the process taken in response to an incident from when you first become aware of the crisis.
Why do I need one? You can’t prepare for every eventuality, but a crisis comms plan provides guidance and clarity if you experience an unplanned and potentially damaging event.
What goes in a crisis comms plan?
As a starting point, I’d suggest…
Who is in your crisis response team and what they are responsible for. The team should include key members of staff and roles may involve liaising with the media, checking legalities in statements and reports, someone to provide data and evidence to back-up statements and someone to look after impacted staff
Your key messages and position statements
A plan of how you will communicate to specified stakeholders, and who is responsible for doing so. The plan should include internal and external procedures and media, employees, customers/clients, the general public, donors etc.
A list of contacts including the media and out of hours phone numbers. You need to keep this up to date!
A list of actions and who is responsible for doing them. For example, the drawing up and issuing of media statements may be done by your comms team (with sign-off from specified people in your crisis response team) on day one of your crisis occurring
Top tips
In no particular order…
1. Communicate as early and as honestly as possible to get people on your side. Staying silent and saying nothing in the hope that it will blow over may make things worse.
2. Be prepared! There may be some obvious risks you can prepare for in advance. Put a system in place so that employees at every level can identify potential risks and know who to report them to.
3. Know who to engage with on social media. It can be time-consuming and frustrating to attempt to respond to every single negative comment. As we all know, some people want to cause trouble and hide behind their accounts to do so, but others may have a justifiable opinion and are open to reasonable discussion.
4. Effective communication is the key to fixing a crisis. There’s no point working hard to find a solution if you don’t or can’t tell people what you’ve done to put things right.
I hope that’s been useful!
If you’re involved with a UK charity or NFP and would like to know more about CharityComms please drop me a line to vicky@tabbytiger.co.uk
The slides used at the Midlands event I mentioned can be viewed online HERE along with some useful resources.