Crisis Communications: Plans and Strategies

It’s an unpleasant truth that crises tend to arise when you’re least expecting them.  By their very nature, most situations requiring crisis communications are unpredictable, meaning that when they do happen time is always of the essence.

Positive brand reputation is hard won and all too easily lost.  So, how do you prepare for the unknown?

In this blog, we’ll look at how a crisis communications strategy and effective crisis communication plan can be worth their weight in gold when things go wrong.

What is Crisis PR?

We use the term crisis PR (or crisis comms) to refer to the communications activity that kicks into action in response to a corporate crisis. The cause and focus of the crisis can take many shapes but the potential risk is typically damage to corporate reputation. 

The role of crisis PR in this situation is to mitigate that damage to a brand’s reputation by managing how the brand communicates with all its stakeholders.  Poorly handled comms in the face of a crisis can make a bad situation unrecoverable, while effective crisis PR can navigate a business through even the choppiest of waters.

What Types of Crisis Should You PRepare For?

While it can be next to impossible to draw up a list of every potential crisis scenario, depending on the industry you operate in, there will be a range of situations that could arise. 

At the most serious end of the scale are situations involving death or injury to customers, the public or colleagues. From contaminated food in food production, grocery and hospitality sectors, to accidents in construction, engineering, retail, transport, travel, leisure or automotive industries, many businesses will need a crisis communications plan in place for these worst-case scenarios.

Significant reputational damage could also be the result of financial mismanagement, major organisational changes (such as redundancies/branch closures), corporate misconduct, operational outages or external threats such as cyber attacks, or even natural disasters that have an impact on a company’s ability to deliver its products or services.

At the lower end of the scale, it’s also worth noting that in today’s social media landscape what can begin as a comparatively low-level issue on a particular platform – such as a complaint or backlash against a post – can quickly gain traction, increase in severity, and spread beyond the original source.  Good social media community management can help to nip these in the bud but some will escalate anyway.  When they do, the speed with which content is shared on social makes a swift response of the essence.

Crisis Communications Plan Best Practice

In the midst of a crisis, you need to be in control of the narrative that’s unfolding. This isn’t about misleading or obfuscating: quite the opposite. It’s about ensuring the true facts are the story, rather than speculation or conjecture. 

The first step in taking hold of the narrative is to establish either your in-house comms team or your PR consultancy as the best source of accurate information. A holding statement is often the right starting point, but the crucial thing is to be available to the right media contacts so that the information being disseminated more widely is coming from you.

To ensure your crisis comms plan is as effective as possible, follow these best practice tips:

1. Agree who is on the crisis team and what their individual roles entail.
2. Have a designated spokesperson(people). Who this is might change depending on the nature of the crisis but should be a senior team member.
3. Act swiftly – if you don’t put accurate information out there, the rumour mill will fill the silence.
4. Make sure you’re addressing all the relevant stakeholders – don’t prioritise the media over your actual customers or shareholders for example, everyone needs to be kept informed as directly as possible.
5. Pay attention to the tone of your communications, this is absolutely critical to how what you’re saying will be received.
6. Be clear and be consistent across all media.
7. Keep the wider team informed, even colleagues not directly involved need to be aware of what is happening, who is handling the situation, and what they should/shouldn’t be sharing outside the organisation. 
8. Train all relevant colleagues on crisis comms handling and keep their knowledge refreshed and up to date – even the best plan is unlikely to be perfectly executed if nobody has looked at it since it was written. It can be hard to find time in busy schedules to prep for something that might never happen, but it will be time well spent if the worst does happen.

In Summary

Every brand will face some sort of crisis at some point. Having a crisis communications strategy and plan in place means that – in the heat of the moment when calm, rational decision making will be much harder – everyone knows what has already been agreed and has a clear framework to follow.

By being transparent, authentic and timely in how you communicate when the crisis hits, you put your business in the best possible position to recover. And while it won’t always feel like it at the time, there’s even a chance you’ll come out the other side with your audiences feeling a greater sense of trust towards your brand if they perceive you to have handled a difficult situation well.

We often talk to our clients about the value of having a crisis comms strategy in place. So, if you don’t have an agreed crisis plan in place with your PR agency, don’t wait until the crisis happens!

If you’d like to chat to us about a bespoke crisis PR plan and service on retainer, please do get in touch.

The author: Jane Ainsworth is managing director of WPR. She has over 20 years’ experience in developing and delivering communications strategies for consumer brands including Dunelm, Tesco, Mothercare, Greene King, John Lewis, Bullring, Beaverbrooks and Westfield.