Learn the what, who, and how of creating a basic crisis management and communications plan that can help hinder or even prevent bad publicity.
Every business needs a a crisis management and communications plan. Any leader who doesn’t know this will be surely and sorely unprepared for the possibility of long term damaging effects of poor publicity that could have been hindered or even prevented with a carefully planned crisis management and communications plan.
Every white hair I have represents some sort of marketing crisis, but none is more harrowing than a PR crisis. From the reporter that gets a big scoop, to brand damaging news, it’s high stakes and high pressure to try to navigate through a PR crisis.
Let’s start by defining a crisis
Plainly – a crisis is a critical event or point of decision which, if not handled in an appropriate and timely manner (or if not handled at all), may turn into a disaster or catastrophe. Think of the 2017 United Airlines violent passenger removal crisis; or 2017’s Uber crisis; or 2019 Away crisis with their CEO Steph Korey.
If you are a seasoned marketer or PR pro who is just cringing at the thought of these incidents, my hope is that you already have a crisis communications plan in place. If you don’t have a plan in place, the time to think about it is now – before a crisis happens. By establishing a crisis management and communications plan early on, you are preparing your organization to deal with any major events that threaten to harm the organization, stakeholders, or the general public.
First of all, let’s examine what makes up a crisis. There’s three common elements:
- There’s a legitimate threat to the organization
- There’s an element of surprise
- There’s a short time frame to make decisions
What types of crises are there?
The type of crisis you are handling will impact your response. These are the types of crises you may experience at your organization:
- Product issues
- Service issues
- Financial issues
- HR issues
- Employee, executive, board, investor, or advisor misconduct
- Partner, vendor, or supplier misconduct
- Facilities issues
- Natural disasters
- Accidents, injuries, or death
- Protests
- Coordinated external campaign or rumors
How to determine the seriousness of a crisis
This is a question you need to answer internally, but a rule of thumb is knowing what directly threatens your business versus what would adjacently threaten your business. See below for some examples:
Tier 1 – This is a crisis that directly mentions the company, your employees, or your products and poses a direct threat to your business.
Tier 2 – This is a crisis that does not directly mention the company, an employee, or your products, but is still a high risk to the business. It may deal with a topic or segment specific or related to your business.
Example: If you are an airline, a crisis at an airplane manufacturer could negatively impact your business.
Creating a crisis management and communications plan
This varies organization to organization, but you will need the following structure – at minimum – and make sure it is clearly documented and shared with everyone directly & even indirectly involved:
- Identifying the type of crises that could happen
- Roles that need to go into managing a crisis (see below) – varies by tier
- Identifying crisis team stakeholders & their back-ups for each activity
Key roles in a crisis plan and the spokespeople
The (internal) crisis plan roles
Crisis Plan Lead – this person will the first notified and kick off the plan. This is generally someone in the corporate communications / PR function. This person needs to be level-headed in crisis, so choose wisely. This is not a role for just anyone – even the most senior people may not be the most level-headed in a crisis. I have seen even the best and most trusted leaders freeze or panic the minute crisis hits.
Communications Lead – this person could be the same person as the plan lead, but may be more senior in terms of the messaging or sign-off. Often this is the marketing leader (CMO, S/VP, Head of Marketing).
Product Lead – depending on your business and the crisis, you will likely need someone who can deep dive into looking into the product and technical needs or even data. This is likely someone from the product team, but could be coupled with the Operation Lead, who is often from engineering.
Operations Lead – Also dependent on the crisis, but this is someone who may be taking a deeper look into product challenges and is often from engineering – maybe by looking into the data or lines of code, or even solving an engineering challenge.
Customer Success/Service Lead – This person will be the face of the customers and lead on fielding any incoming questions from customers and pushing any messaging out.
Note: In smaller organizations, and depending on the severity of the situation, the executive team may have more involvement – they may even beed to be the
Always have a primary person and a back-up for each of these roles.
External facing spokespeople
These are the people who will speak on behalf of the business – if necessary. They should be organized by types of crisis. Examples include – for business impacting situations, the CEO generally takes lead, but can often be backed by a COO or a CMO. For product challenges, I would lead with a CPO or CTO, and so on. You need to decide, based on optics, who would be best suited for that role.
Note: Make sure your spokespeople are media trained – it’s incredibly important that the are prepared and understand how to bridge in case they are asked a tough question they don’t know how to answer.
What about a PR agency?
Whether you have an in-house PR team, or external PR agency, there should be a plan to enact regardless of your set-up. If you have an in-house team and they are not equipped to handle crisis, they should have built relationships with an external agency or resource that are a pro in picking up crises management. The same goes for your external PR agency, they should have a plan in place for handling crises – whether it’s your core team, or tapping into other resources they have in their agency.
There are plenty of other things that I can tell you to do, including building a communications template of how messaging will go out to customers (email? social? public announcement?), or making sure you build a way to monitor for potential crises in real time (actually – do that). But the realities are, every business is different, so start having the discussions and hopefully use this post as a jumping off point to a thoughtful plan that will, fingers crossed, never have to be executed.
Header Photo by Ethan Haddox on Unsplash