But if you don’t manage your reputational risk and you end up suffering reputational damage due to a crisis, it can have disastrous consequences on the viability of your business.
How you communicate in times of a crisis – or an emerging issue/crisis – can determine how your brand survives and bounces back from any reputational damage.
While it’s hard to predict exactly what – or when – a problem might emerge, we can influence how we weather the storm. The businesses that return from setbacks have one thing in common: they plan.
Having a robust crisis communications plan already in place provides a company with the clear pathway to manage a high stress situation. Before creating your plan, you should assess the range of potential issues and crises that can impact your brand’s reputation.
Start with scenario planning
Not all problems are equal. When assessing a situation, you need to honestly and logically consider the range of potential risks to your business. We use a Business Risk Evaluation Scale (a severity/likelihood matrix) to help clients with their scenario planning.
Questions to consider:
- What is the severity of the issue to your business? Is it: negligible, minor, moderate, significant or severe?
- What is the likelihood of the issue occurring? Is it: remote, unlikely, possible, likely or almost certain?
Problems that fall into negligible, minor or moderate are controllable issues. While it can be stressful and inconvenient, rarely are these situations completely detrimental to the company’s reputation. However, if the severity of an issue is significant or severe (even if the likelihood of it happening is remote or unlikely), this needs to be planned for and become a core focus of your crisis comms plan.
Examples of potential crisis events include:
- A technology failure or data security breach
- An internal crisis, such as confrontation between team members
- A public relations scandal involving a prominent member of staff
- Another pandemic
- Natural disaster
- A crisis involving an event your company sponsors
Once you’ve identified a list of scenarios that you want to plan for, start thinking about your crisis communications response.
What’s in your crisis communications plan
Think about how you want your brand to be perceived at the end of this scenario. What does success look like?
1. Identify your key people involved in the crisis comms engine room
- List job titles, people in those roles, contact details and back-up contact details if you can’t reach them in the first instance.
- Identify who your spokesperson/people are. Messaging should ONLY come from them.
2. Identify audiences – who needs to know?
- Don’t forget your team/staff/shareholders/suppliers/distributors/iwi/rūnaka
- List contact details of emergency services, local council and other stakeholders
3. Messages: Control the narrative
- What do you want people to believe about you?
- Messaging may vary for each stakeholder group but keep it consistent. Sometimes less is more. You don’t need to give people the full blow-by-blow account.
4. Channels
- Where do your audiences/people hang out?
- Consider Owned, Earned, Shared and Paid channels and how they work with each other
- Tell your people first then your wider networks
5. Communications tools
- For each scenario, think about what sort of material you need to have in your bottom drawer. This includes internal comms (EDMs), media releases, social media posts, a ‘dark website’ for crisis comms management.
The role of media in a crisis
It’s wise to plan – and expect – media interest when a crisis occurs. While it’s natural to want to stick our heads in the sand or just dismiss journalists, this can cause further reputational damage. Instead, we need to know how to talk to media.
| Note: It’s also important to remember that journalists typically reach out because they’re seeking information relating to public interest and want the details from the best source. Rarely is it done because of some bad blood, personal agenda or malicious intent. Having the skills to navigate media is a delicate dance, but it’s an important one to learn. |
If you’re in tourism, your Crisis Communications Plan should sit alongside your Crisis Operations Plan. These documents need to be known throughout the business, by all staff members and regularly updated.
As part of our fully-integrated communications approach, we work with clients to ensure they have these documents prepared and have a fine-tuned crisis comms process is in place – it’s far better to have a plan, than panic if it all hits the fan. Learn more about crisis communication here.
