PR crisis

What if something terrible happened to you?

Every organization is vulnerable to a crisis. On many levels.

If you ignore it – it doesn’t disappear.

An employee sends out a racist tweet. You lay off workers. Your CEO gets in a car crash. There’s video of an employee doing something illegal. Or your product kills someone in a popular TV show.

Maybe it’s not even your crisis – but a vendor or client of yours is having a crisis.

The media calls.

You need to answer them. And release an internal statement, or even better, a video.

You don’t know what to do or say.

There are three rules for crisis management to remember:

1. Acknowledge the issue
2. Take responsibility quickly (think Extreme Ownership Jocko Willink style)
3. Overcorrect

The good news is, this is easier if you prepare.

So how do you prepare for the unexpected?

1. Brainstorm for any possible crises that can affect your organization. Once you identify the possibilities, you will see there are steps you can take to prevent certain ones from happening. Do so.
2. Identify your crisis team. Who are the people the team will look towards for guidance?
3. Choose and train your spokesperson. This is BIG. Make sure the spokesperson is trained for a crisis and knows how to stay on message even while managing the hardest questions. Outline which spokesperson, if more than one, is handling which news outlet i.e. local and national news outlets, social media, newspaper, etc.
4. Notification and monitoring. How are you going to notify employees, stakeholders, and the public?
5. Develop your crisis messages. When everything hits the fan, having this mapped out will be hugely beneficial when time is of the essence.
6. Assess and adapt messages. When the crisis is on… assess and adapt to the situation in real-time.
7. Post-crisis: inspect. After the dust has settled, inspect how your team and organization handled the crisis and determine what could have been done better and faster.

The basic steps of effective crisis communications are not difficult, but they require work in order to minimize the damage.

The impact on your financial and reputation’s bottom line will be more severe if you do not plan.

Employees and other stakeholders won’t know what’s happening and will become confused and angry.

Your organization will be perceived as inept and possibly criminally negligent.

The media crisis will last MUCH longer.

Preparedness is KEY.