How to handle a PR crisis

An organisational crisis is a low probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of an organisation. Because PR crises are difficult to predict, like any other business risk, they should be approached with deliberate preparation and planning. Often this involves setting up a crisis management plan to help your organisation protect its integrity and reputation in the event of a crisis.

We’ve listed a series of tasks often included in crisis management plans to help you ensure your organisation is well prepared when crisis looms.

Before the Crisis:

1. Form a Crisis Management Team: In the event of a crisis, the Crisis Management Team will make the decision to activate the crisis plan and agree on key messaging. Members of the CMT usually include the organisation’s PR team, legal team and a member of the executive leadership team, ideally the CEO. It is important to identify the members of the CMT and update the CMT emergency contact details regularly, ensuring the contact details are available online and in hard copy. Circulate the list regularly.

2. Monitor perceptions: Knowing what is being said about your organisation on social media, traditional media, by employees, customers and other stakeholders often allows you to catch a negative trend that, if unchecked, could turn into a crisis. Google Alerts is a free and easy way to monitor sentiment in both traditional and social media.

3. Identify spokespeople: As with all external communications, organisations should ensure that only authorised spokespeople speak on behalf of the organisation, whether that is making official statements or answering media questions. This is particularly important during a crisis. A minimum of two spokespeople should undertake professional media training prior to a crisis, with training repeated at least every two years to build confidence and ensure media messaging is on track.

4. Establish communication systems: It is critical to establish communication systems that will allow your organisation to rapidly reach both internal and external stakeholders using a variety of communications methods. Preparing more than one method of contact for each stakeholder group will greatly increase the chances of your messages getting through during a crisis. For example, you can use text messages, emails and the staff Intranet when communicating with employees, and emails and media releases to distribute information to customers and clients.

5. Prepare holding statements: While full message development must await the outbreak of an actual crisis, holding statements can be prepared in advance and tailored for use in a wide variety of scenarios. This ensures the organisation is able to include specific facts and distribute a statement quickly and easily after a crisis breaks. The best holding statements are simple and concise, detailing who was involved, what happened, when it happened and where.

 During the Crisis:

1. Activate crisis management plan: As soon as a crisis unfolds, the CMT should communicate immediately to determine whether the organisation’s crisis management plan should be activated and if so, what position the organisation will take.

2. Decide on positioning: Once the crisis management plan has been activated, the CMT should agree to adopt one or more positions. This can include human error, clerical error, unauthorised procedures, inadequate supervision, inadequate quality control, misuse of confidential information, errors of judgement, inadequate standard operating procedures or uncontrolled event or natural disaster. The positioning an organisation takes determines the key messages it communicates to its stakeholders.

3. Communicate with stakeholders: It is important to communicate with the organisation’s stakeholders as soon as the crisis unfolds. If you don’t, your organisation could lose its opportunity to control the event. This is done by adapting and issuing the holding statement.

4. Analyse the situation, gather the facts and prepare communications materials: Once the crisis management plan has been activated and the holding statement has been issued, work can begin to gather more details about the event and prepare communications materials. This can include media releases, which provide further explanation of the issues and facts at hand based on the organisation’s position; and spokesperson briefing notes, which are used to communicate the organisation’s key messages and position.

5. Ensure high-level approval: The executive and legal teams should approve all communications materials issued to the media and other stakeholders during a crisis. All spokespeople should stick to the key messages, defer to police when appropriate and ensure the message communicated is as positive as possible given the particular situation.

6. Monitor the media: It’s important to keep an eye out for any coverage of the crisis by regularly monitoring the media and social media, and conducting regular Google keyword searches relating to the crisis. It pays to also review any media outlets that have inquired about the situation.

After the Crisis:

1. Review and evaluate your response: Once the crisis has been managed, it is valuable to hold a meeting with the CMT and other relevant internal stakeholders to assess the management of the crisis, what worked well, what didn’t work and activities that could be improved going forward. Document your learning and adapt the crisis communications strategy accordingly.

Effective crisis management calls for preparation and open, honest communication between an organisation and its stakeholders. It is almost human nature to try and minimise the problem when the reality is too difficult to deal with, but at the end of the day, it is your duty to keep your stakeholders well informed.

Jo Scard, Founder & Managing Director Fifty Acres. 

Jo Scard

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Jo Scard, Founder and CEO of communications and engagement agency Fifty Acres, has over 20 years’ experience in communications, corporate and political advisory roles and journalism making her one of Australia’s foremost strategic advisers. A respected former journalist in the UK and Australia Jo has worked with ITV, Associated Press, Seven Network, SBS, ABC and Fairfax. Jo has been a senior adviser to the Rudd and Gillard government’s and to the British Labour Party. A trained lawyer she is a Member of the NSW Council of the Public Relations Institute of Australia and on the Boards of Fitted for Work and Hockey ACT. Jo started Fifty Acres over ten years ago because she wanted to create an agency that supported flexible work and that was motivated by strong values and work in the for-purpose sectors.

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