5 Crisis Management Resolutions for 2016
[By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications]
Unless your organization was incredibly lucky this past year, either something bad happened to you, or you – or someone associated with you – did something bad to someone else. Even though we work with clients in crisis virtually every day, we are constantly amazed by the never-ending variety of ways that organizations and the people in them can get into trouble.
If you were very lucky, you were well-prepared to manage your crisis and it was resolved quickly and quietly, with minimal impact on your operations or your reputation. If you were less lucky, your crisis proved to be a prolonged, all-consuming event that threatened staff morale, affected sales, endangered customer relations and damaged relationships with your most important allies.
If you have determined in 2016 to better manage your next crisis and not let it manage you, here are five recommendations to help you achieve that New Year’s resolution:
1) Get a check-up. Take the time now to identify and prioritize the threats your organization faces that are most likely to evolve into crisis events. Address the ones you can address, and prepare for the ones beyond your ability to control. In our business, we call that a Vulnerabilities Audit. Let us help you conduct one for your organization.
2) Get prepared. Managing a crisis on the fly involves extra stress you don’t need to inflict on yourself and your colleagues. Your organization may have an emergency response plan, but if you don’t have a companion Crisis Communications Plan, you have a large gap in your crisis preparedness protocol. Let us work with you to develop a customized plan to identify how you communicate what, how, when and to whom when the worst occurs.
3) Get trained. Probably the most high-risk crisis activity you can undertake is to speak to the media without any advance training. There is an art to formulating and delivering messages under stress that is best learned before you face a reporter’s deadline. Let us custom design a media training program to get your team ready to effectively deal with the media in a crisis.
4) Get social. If your organization has established accounts with platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc., you are well on your way to having a valuable crisis management tool in your pocket. While a robust presence on social media pays enormous dividends when you are brand-building, it can also serve as a critical way to get your messages out when a crisis hits. If you haven’t invested in building your social media presence yet, 2016 would be an excellent time to start.
5) Get more friends. While the media are critical to successfully managing your response to a crisis, there are many other audiences you need to communicate with – and you need support from – when the worst happens. Now would be a good time to make sure you have solid communications programs in place to help your stakeholders know who you are, what you do, and what your values are. If a crisis hits, your friends are likely to come to your defense; strangers less so.
If we can add a sixth recommendation: Get started now. Before you know it, 2016 will be in high gear and those crisis resolutions you pledged to keep in the waning hours of 2015 will be distant memories. That is, until one of those unlucky events happens to arrive on your doorstep and crisis management becomes your all-consuming job description.