This post first appeared in Anthony Bullick’s Daily Post column.
Developing a comprehensive crisis communications plan ensures your brand is as prepared as possible to protect and maintain your reputation in the face of an issue.
A key element of the strategy is scenario planning: developing different reasons why your organisation may come under fire or face tricky questions from stakeholders.
Think beyond the obvious as well as avoid assumptions to make sure your crisis PR activity is robust.
At the outset, clearly define what may constitute an issue or crisis within your company: typically, this can be anything from a series of negative reviews to a serious incident involving the emergency services.
Liaise with all departments to identify risks they face. For example, for your HR team, it could be constructive dismissal, an employee’s actions outside of the workplace, or poor feedback on independent sites such as Glassdoor.
Meanwhile, your finance team may flag up the potential of below par financial results in the next set of accounts, while your social media agency may highlight concerns with an employee’s personal social media account.
Scour news sites to review issues your competitors have had to deal with. In addition, check out businesses in vertical sectors to consider all eventualities. For example, if you run a hotel, analyse risks associated with a housing association.
Also look at emerging threats nationally and internationally. For instance, greenwashing, even inadvertently, threatens to damage reputations like never before.
When the war between Ukraine and Russia started, it affected supplies of food and construction materials. Many firms experienced delays in servicing customers, either directly or via their supply chain.
Cyber security is another hot topic, with SMEs being constantly targeted alongside large organisations, placing GDPR as well as disrupted operations high on the list of possible issues.
Draft reactive statements for each scenario and seek the necessary approvals.
Having immediate access to a response allows for quick communication to inbound media enquiries or directly to your stakeholders, avoiding silence, which can be filled with rumour and misinformation.
Each crisis situation will be different, so develop a set of FAQs that could be asked by stakeholders. For example, if there is a fire at your facility, queries could focus on whether there are injuries, if operations have been impacted, and how the fire started.
While the hope is that the scenario planning exercise gathers digital dust on the cloud, it’s a fact of life and business that things go wrong. To quote Benjamin Franklin, by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.