When a crisis occurs you will need to act quickly to establish your communication objectives. You will need to send out a message to your customers and stakeholders and provide them with a suitable level of reassurance. It is important to demonstrate that your business can be trusted and that you are the best people to be dealing with and resolving the problem.
Remember to brief your staff and to be clear about what they can say. This will help to ensure consistent official messages are delivered and that the same information is given out when staff talk to their friends and family members or when they are collared by a journalist who is trying to get information by the back door.
Crisis communication is about managing your communication both during and after a crisis. If you do it well, you will preserve your reputation and maintain trust. If you do it badly, you can say goodbye to the years of hard work you have spent building customer loyalty.
Be prepared
Spend time now planning for the worst. Work through some crisis scenarios and think about:
In an emergency would you know how to log onto your social media accounts? How quickly could you get a message on your website or change your answerphone message?
When the pressure is on, it is good to be able to respond quickly to initial media enquiries so spend time now drafting holding statements for your various scenarios. If you later find yourself needing to issue one of these statements, it will be a lot easier to tweak something you have already written than it will to write something from scratch.
Think about who will be your principal spokesperson. Ideally, it should be the CEO who is seen to take personal charge during a crisis but more importantly, your nominated spokesperson should be an excellent communicator. Consider arranging a session of media training to sharpen up your spokesperson’s skills in front of the camera or on the airwaves.
Put together a crisis communications’ grab bag. Include contact details for the media, frequencies for local radio stations, contact telephone numbers for staff, stationery, a mobile phone charger, your draft press statements and background information packs for the media. Keep it somewhere accessible so you can ‘grab’ it if needed.
Having been involved in a number of emergency situations, we can guarantee that being prepared will pay dividends.