Crisis comms unpacked: Essentials for effective messaging under pressure
Crises can’t always be avoided, and you can’t plan for every eventuality, but you can manage them to limit any damage caused and to prevent small issues from becoming catastrophes.
What is a crisis? A crisis is an event which could cause harm to the reputation or viability of your business.
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? It provides guidance and clarity in the eventuality of 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! They 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 on social media. 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.