WHY YOUR ORGANIZATION NEEDS A CRISIS COMMUNICATIONS PLAN

“It won’t happen to us.” The infamous words that truly every organization believes, until it in fact, does happen to them.

WHAT IS A CRISIS?

Crisis communications plans are an integral part of business operations, especially if you have direct contact with the public, produce a consumer good [food especially!], or are in medicine/medical adjacent industries. Perhaps before we get rolling, we should level set: what is a “crisis”? There are lots of definitions for this, but here’s the most direct one I can provide you: A crisis is something inherently negative that disrupts “business as usual” to the point where it is impossible to continue without addressing. Some famous ones you’ll be familiar with are Boeing Max 8, Tylenol poisoning, and the many BP oil spills, to name a few. These crises made headlines, shut down business operations, and defined these brands’ reputations for the better part of a decade.

Crisis survivability depends on pre-planning, not the crisis itself. A crisis communications plan helps ensure you’re not caught unaware.

WHAT IS A CRISIS COMMUNICATION PLAN?

So what does communication or PR have to do with managing a crisis that isn’t actually about communication? You can’t fix a plane by talking, right? True. But you can make the situation invariably worse by not talking [looking at you Dennis Muilenburg], or by saying the wrong thing [cue up Tony Hayward]. Creating a crisis communication plan addresses key areas including:

• What the most likely and damaging crises your organization may face are, and how to get in front of them [used with the impact-likelihood model];

• Creates a plan of how and when to address the public, depending or what you know, or not;

• Evaluates the risk of various communication strategies and tactics;

• Preemptively assigns responsibility and information control to keep the message tight and the spokesperson [who is pre-defined] on-brand;

• Ultimately mitigates risk if [when] something happens because the strategy is in place. Your team doesn’t spend the most valuable minutes they have wondering how to address a roaring and growing public fury.

WHY DO ORGANIZATIONS NEED CRISIS PLANS?

Crisis plans are not sexy and they often don’t feel good. They imagine your business on the worst day in the worst way and what happened to get it there. But they also allow for an opportunity to grow and change systems that could enable that damage so the crisis could be prevented. They create a framework for honest and transparent communication that can build and restore public trust, activate brand evangelists, and insulate the brand from further negative impact. We remember brands based on how they handle a crisis. Tylenol has been immortalized as caring, empathetic, and consumer-first after the way they handled the tampering issue in the 80s. Boeing, a former aviation superstar, has become a fallen star after their repeated failures in aviation design and communication leadership. Crisis survivability depends on pre-planning, not the crisis itself. A crisis communications plan helps ensure you’re not caught unaware.

Interested in beginning this process for your organization? Get in touch.