The steps for successful public relations crisis management
While no brand wants to be embroiled in a crisis, sometimes situations arise which are out of your control and require the attention of public relations experts.
As defined by the CIPR, “Public Relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.”
Crisis management is a critical component of a public relations (PR) strategy. It allows brands to control the narrative and limit reputational damage when an incident occurs. From a death or major injury in the workplace, to a controversial and poorly received marketing campaign, crises can be wide ranging and depend on the nature of the business.
Without a crisis management plan built into a broader PR strategy, responsibilities become unclear and responses risk being slow, inconsistent or non-existent, leaving the media and the public free to draw their own conclusions and dictate the narrative.
This article will take you through the steps of crisis management in PR – from adequate preparation and an understanding of how to control a story, to reflecting on your experiences and evaluating the robustness of your strategy in action.
Crisis management relies on thorough preparation
The correct starting point is to build a water tight strategy so that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities. A well thought out strategy should make decision making accurate and efficient and reduce the time it takes to publish a response. With crisis management, speed and accuracy are everything.
A strategy should first outline responsible persons and attribute tasks to individuals and teams, with contingencies in place if people are unavailable. This could be people working within your business, or third party suppliers such as a specialist public relations agency.
Next, identify risks within your business and highlight where crises are most likely to occur. Once your risks are logged, it’s good practice to draft holding statements for each scenario to speed up the initial response time.
You can now map out critical lines of communication, including internal approval processes and likely external media outlets where information will be shared.
Finally, allow for a period of reflection and learning after the dust has settled to evaluate the sentiment of coverage and how the situation was handled.
When a crisis unfolds remember to assess, activate, and act
History has taught us what happens when brands make a mess of crisis management. Many notable names have got it wrong over the years – from American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” marketing campaign, to United Airlines’ handling of how they removed a passenger from a flight in 2017.
Common mistakes brands make include not responding, acting too late, or reading the situation incorrectly.
As any credible PR professional will tell you, when a situation arises, the first step is to assess. This is where you gather the facts using accurate, verified sources to answer the who, what, where, when, why and how:
– Who is involved in this situation?
– What has happened?
– Where has this event happened?
– When did it happen?
– Why did the situation unfold?
– How have these events come about?
With the facts to hand, you can activate your strategy and work through the processes previously outlined.
Communication should be immediate, with your holding statement issued first before regular updates follow across your internal and external communication channels as the situation unfolds. These include social media, email marketing and internal marketing communications platforms.
Throughout your responses, show empathy and acknowledge the situation, even if the full facts have not yet come to light. Be accountable where the fault lies with you and do not deflect or hide information. Deflection and a lack of accountability break trust, and hidden information will likely come to light at a later date, harming your brand’s long-term credibility.
The final stage of your response should be to highlight the actions being taken by the business to resolve the crisis and prevent similar situations from occurring in the future.
For example, if an employee has been seriously injured in the workplace, how is the business looking after that member of staff and supporting them through their recovery? And what health and safety measures is the company putting in place to reduce the chances of the same injury happening again?
By explaining your actions, you are showing accountability and evidencing the learning and growth taking place within the business. These are the first steps on the road to mending consumer trust in public relations.
The storm may have passed, but the hard work continues
The noise around your brand might have calmed down, but your communications strategy should still be hard at work.
The aftermath of a crisis is the perfect time to reflect and learn from your experiences by evaluating coverage sentiment and the public reaction to your responses. You should also gauge internal perceptions from employees and stakeholders, and encourage feedback as part of your learning journey.
As soon as you have collated and analysed all of the available data and you have a firm understanding of public perception, it’s wise to review your crisis management strategy and assess how well it served you throughout the process.
How easy was it to work through your plan? Did you encounter avoidable obstacles within the content creation or approval processes? And were you quick enough to release information at each stage?
In many ways, reflecting on lived experiences is the most important step of public relations and crisis management. You can plan all you want, but a strategy can only be truly judged after it’s put into practice.
If your brand needs support with building an integrated public relations and crisis management strategy, then our team of experts is here to help.
