Crisis Communication: Plan and Response for 2021

Any corporation or brand is vulnerable in a crisis. The days when companies could ignore a situation while continuing to work normally are long gone. This is because stakeholders are a lot more interested in what’s happening in companies and how situations in the public eye can impact the future of a business.

When companies don’t prepare beforehand, they end up undergoing a lot more damage than necessary, failing to address numerous communications issues beforehand which is how situations spiral out of control.

And when businesses fail to adequately prepare beforehand, their operational response will decline. Stakeholders will be confused, and react negatively because they don’t know what’s happening. The company itself will be perceived as incompetent, and the longer the response takes, the bigger the impact is going to be.

Anticipation

Before a situation develops, companies should be proactive and prepare by creating crisis communications teams that will have sessions where they create potential crisis situations, work out how those situations can be prevented, and think about possible crisis responses.

The team will audit the company for potential vulnerabilities and create an assessment document, then work on a response plan for that assessment which includes communications and operational components.

Team

The crisis communications team should be created by people across different departments inside the company, from leaders to executives, to legal counsel and even chief advisers, as well as PR professionals with crisis communications expertise.

A legal counsel in this team is essential because they will be a guiding force when it comes to the court of law, while the PR professional will be focusing on the court of public opinion. Both types of members are crucial because a crisis situation can evolve in these two different aspects. While a crisis can end in the public’s eyes, it might take years before it’s resolved within a legal process.

Spokesperson

Depending on the size, a company should train a single, or several spokespeople specifically for crisis situations, and these are the only people who will be authorized to speak during the crisis with the public and the press. The spokespeople should be pre-screened as well as trained well before a crisis ever occurs, and the company should make sure that these people have the right skills, training, and authority.

Different people have different strengths and that’s why bigger companies can easily manage having different spokespersons during a crisis. For example, one might be a person who will focus on responding to the public via the company’s social media profiles, in written form. Then there will be a person who will respond in person, in front of cameras and microphones.

Additionally, certain highly sensitive situations mandate that the lead spokesperson for the crisis should be the chief executive, instead of anyone else, which means the executive has to be trained beforehand, as well.

Ronn Torossian is the CEO and Founder of 5W Public Relations. 5W PR is a leading digital pr and influencer marketing agency.