Crisis Planning

The following article is reprinted from Ad/COM Magazine:

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Corporate Communications
Crisis planning: expecting the unexpected
by Laurance S. Morrison, APR

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You need a crisis public relations plan to help you confidently manage a surprise circumstance requiring immediate action at an untimely moment when your organization's vital interests are at stake and the outcome is unclear.

Your plan must be general enough to guide you through a merely awkward situation or a catastrophe. It must fix individual assignments. It must be written and widely distributed and understood and easy to use.

Finally, your plan should enable you to implement your company's established approach to press and media relations. (Hashing out that stance under duress promotes argument, mistakes, lasting ill will and interference with the management of the demanding, primary and larger matter at hand.)

A crisis may be physical: fire, theft, vandalism, harm to a (celebrity) customer. It may have moral or ethical implications: fraud, financial wrongdoing, misuse of property.

Your organization may be the victim. It may be at fault. The evidence may be tangible, or it may take the form of someone's word. Law enforcement authorities, attorneys, insurance agents, medical personnel or public officials may have a role.

The consequences may be more or less than anyone imagines.

When a crisis occurs, appear calm, even if turmoil reigns. A calm appearance begins with the possession of a crisis public relations plan, which includes:

• facts-verification procedure

• designated spokesperson and back up

• call list of home phones of key staffers

• established site of "information central"

• notification of board members and, as appropriate, relevant financial backers

• assignments for security and maintenance departments

• internal communications flow plan

• administrative situation-analysis to produce remedies designed to prevent recurrences

• documentation by photo and/or video of physical evidence.

Here are some tips:

Press/media: never lie. Never guess to fill a gap in the facts. Never "no comment." Avoid petty details, unless they illuminate a larger, helpful point. Expect clamor if the crisis is of sizable proportions. Treat all reporters equally. The same information you volunteer becomes sensational if, instead, reporters find it.

Company-victim: consider converting the crisis into an appeal for support.

Company-at-fault: be mindful of the organization's potential culpability in anything you say. Admit nothing.

Public relations counsel: understand that you cannot, by definition, manage a crisis. But you can take charge of your response. From the facts, project your judgments of the foreseeable outcomes, and the likelihood of each. Maintain an attitude by which you help to steer the institution through the crisis to reach a specific and best possible result, with public understanding of it.

Arrange for quarterly crisis plan reviews and control of continuing operations during the crisis and a review after the situation subsides.

Focused though you may be on the crisis, remember that it will pass and the continuing interests of the company need protection. A crisis, though unwelcome, offers an opportunity to strengthen your organization.