Facing a major organizational crisis may be daunting, and in the times of “cancel culture”, it is more important than ever that your company or brand not only survives a crisis, but thrives when it is all said and done.
Here are our must follow steps to navigate a crisis:
1. Practice your Crisis Communications Plan (and renew yearly)
Your crisis communications plan has to be practiced. Unless you make testing the plan an essential component of preparedness it doesn’t happen. A team should not look at a crisis communications plan for the first time in a crisis- it will not be successful. Part of making sure your team stays on track is to practice the plan.
Conduct real time drills that you renew every year. Make sure your team is familiar with it. Having a plan that sits on your desktop unpracticed will not be successful.
2. Define your Crisis Team
Who’s on your crisis team? You need to be selective when deciding this! Each member needs to be clear of his/her responsibility during the crisis, e.g. social media posting. This will help everybody stay in their lane when its crunch time.
It is also necessary to be clear about the number of people and who they are going to for approval anything before any statement is released. One of the things that really slows down a crisis response is when there are too many hands involved in the process and too many eyes looking at the press release/statement.
3. Control the narrative behind the crisis and use the opportunity to learn
No crisis should go wasted and at the very least should be viewed as an opportunity to learn. You and your team should reflect as soon as the crisis is over to learn and grow.
Any good Communications team knows that owning the narrative surrounding the crisis is crucial. Be sure you create the narrative and the way it’s being talked about. That always works better for you than chasing someone else’s interpretation. Remember, if you are silent that space will be filled by somebody else (usually social media trolls), and there is no worse situation than having an organization defined by someone else’s narrative. Become the credible source of information that others would turn to for the real story!
4. Monitor and assess the crisis
Your communications team should be actively monitoring the crisis from beginning, all the way to its resolution (this includes a look at your incoming calls and not just social media platforms).
Bad news doesn’t get better with age, so we reiterate the importance of jumping in front the crisis! Once you have defined what the situation is, which you need to do fast (less than an hour), think about your position and take ownership of the situation. The only way to do that is to be in front of it.
Your team must assess where you are in the situation and what your timeline is. Media monitoring will let you know if you’re feeding your own bad story. In essence this means that everyone has lost interest or no longer talking about it but you’re company is still sending out updates. That’s not doing you any good.
Monitoring during a crisis also includes your organization’s employees. Are they engaging on social media about the topic during a crisis? This definitely is not helpful. Every employee should be knowledgeable of the company’s social media policy which asks employees not to talk about the organization on social media. This social media policy should be enforced throughout the year, and should be part of every incoming employee’s orientation. Employees can be very damaging as reporters monitor your social platforms, and can see who are employees. If they’re on the hunt for an inside scoop, they can send them direct messages asking for comments.
5. Evaluate your crisis communications response
In evaluating your crisis communications response, you must identify milestones achieved in the crisis communications objectives you made at the onset. Examples include- most positive media placements, least negative media placements, no media at all, and media covering key words.
If you’re following a good crisis protocol, your team should assemble at the beginning to set your objectives and make sure you have a common understanding of the situation. Although your team then needs to go get stuff done, there should be very regular regrouping of your crisis team so that you’re sharing information but also sharing your assessment of all those inputs.
So in addition to evaluating your social platforms, note the following:
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How many calls you’re getting
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How many media calls
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Have you answered questions people are asking you
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How many questions were not dealt with
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Are there lots of misinformation you need to fix?
The crisis evaluation needs to happen in real time, and your crisis team should be allowed agility as the crisis morphs. The debriefing process will be critical and will assess whether your crisis plan needs to evolve and adjust. The milestones you set out to achieve on the onset of the crisis needs to be all encompassing- both internally and externally. Internally, look at your emails communications and how often the executive team meets. Externally, how many interview requests are there and is the media accurately telling your side of the story.
6. Finding your way back after a crisis
Your crisis communications team would have been equipped with the milestones against which you will measure how well you did, and where areas of importance are. Post crisis, you must now delve deeper into “what did we learn and what can we do differently? “
Once you’re in a brand or reputation deficit position, you have to look at how you’re going to come back! The way back is generally long, hard and expensive, and sometimes not possible. The best course is to mitigate the risk or manage the situation so you can enhance your reputation.
The way back is “show me, tell me”- the process of demonstrating how you’ve changed. Your response should be authentic to your brand’s core values, otherwise you pose the risk of not connecting with your core brand ambassadors.