From unpleasant financial escalations and global health concerns to workplace accidents, sometimes, the worst does happen. While we can’t predict or prevent every crisis, we can prepare ourselves to handle them. The best approach is to create a well-rounded crisis communication plan to keep your business operations intact and protect your reputation during challenging times.
But what is a crisis communication plan, and how do you create one? With the help of our experts, we’ve created a full-fledged guide with all the answers.
Table of Contents
What Is a Crisis Communication Plan?
A crisis management plan is a document outlining the basic guidelines that prepare your business for unexpected events or emergencies. The plan should detail every step your staff should take during a crisis, how to address the public, and what to do to prevent similar situations in the future.
These crisis management communication plans focus on how a brand responds to emergencies and communicates the situation to customers and stakeholders. This public relations strategy ensures that the same information reaches the general public, stakeholders, employees, customers, and partners alike, both offline and on online channels.
Having a public relations program in place ensures consistent messaging about the unexpected event, demonstrates your brand's professional and humane attitude toward what’s happening, and helps mitigate additional reputational damage by addressing concerns and queries across all communication channels.
Possible Crisis Scenarios
Almost any situation can escalate into a crisis requiring attention. However, the most common crisis scenarios include:
- Personnel: Changes to your staff that may affect the workflow, reputation, and operations, such as layoffs, furloughs, scandals, or controversial behavior.
- Financial: Addressing material problems such as store closures or announcing bankruptcy.
- Natural: These types of crises usually necessitate an announcement regarding procedure changes. For example, discussing new safety precautions during a health crisis.
- Organizational: Wrongdoing in misconduct in organizational practices.
- Workplace violence: Violence committed by or to current or former employees.
- Technological: Functionality loss or reduced functionality caused by outages, resulting in technical failure.
- Crisis of malevolence: When a business uses illegal or criminal means to extort, harm, destroy, or destabilize a competitor.
- Confrontation: Dissatisfied individuals confront a business because of unmet demands or needs.
How To Create a Crisis Communication Plan
Crafting a plan from scratch can be overwhelming. As such, here’s a template to help you navigate the process easier.
1. Create a Response Team
First up, assemble a core team that will be responsible for handling different aspects of the crisis. Create a list of these team members along with their contact information. Consider setting up group chats or emails to reach out to everyone at once.
Once you’ve created the core team, add support staff to them. Teams that should be involved include your social media team, security, customer support, legal, and C-suite executives.
2. Identify Responsibilities
When the team is assembled, define each member’s responsibilities and roles, including your core and greater response teams, to avoid confusion during a crisis. You can assign your core team members to handle social communications directly, while support teams may be tasked to draft press releases. Your social team may also be tasked with creating a comprehensive social campaign to minimize the damage.
3. Create an Escalation Framework
Responding to crises comes with stress. Companies must be swift to resolve problems and not make things worse. As such, you should establish a clear escalation framework to manage the crisis efficiently:
3.1. Alert
Make sure that every relevant team member gets notified about the crisis through a designated communication channel.
3.2. Assess What Happened
Evaluate the incident’s severity and how you potentially respond by asking key questions:
- What happened?
- Where did it happen and when?
- Who was involved or affected?
- How much do we know?
3.3. Activation
After assessing the situation, activate all relevant team members to begin managing the crisis. The initial steps may include holding an all-hands meeting, responding to inquiries, and creating press releases and communication messages for customers and stakeholders.
3.4. Monitor
The crisis communication process may take weeks or months. As such, you should continuously keep an eye on what’s happening, how your channels are doing, and whether communication is administered effectively.
3.5. Adjourn
Once the immediate danger has passed, come together with your team and assess how the situation was handled, the outcomes, and whether any changes are needed to improve responses in the future.
Best Practices for Creating a Crisis Communication Plan
Now that you understand how to create a plan from scratch, let’s discuss some of the best practices you should follow in creating a crisis management communication plan.
- Identify the plan’s goal
- Determine your stakeholders
- Determine the information-sharing hierarchy
- Assign staff to create fact sheets
- Outline common scenarios in the plan
- Identify common questions and answer them
- Determine potential risks
- Address social media guidelines
1. Identify the Plan’s Goal
Start with identifying the objective of your crisis communication plan. In this case, the objective is mostly a given. The plan should create a structure for holding down communications with both external and internal stakeholders during a crisis that affects standard business functions and the company’s reputation.
2. Determine Your Stakeholders
When developing the plan, it’s essential to know who you're designing it for. Create a list of every stakeholder you want to inform about the emergency. This can include:
- Users and customers
- Employees
- Investors
- Media outlets
- Government agencies
- The general public (including nearby residents in case of a location-based problem.
- Your social media community
After listing them, add the necessary contact information for each group.
3. Determine the Information-Sharing Hierarchy
Create a hierarchy for how information will be disseminated within the company. This way, no matter who notices the crisis first, they’ll know who they should report it to.
The hierarchy will mainly depend on your team’s structure. In most cases, the president or CEO of the company will be notified first, then the head of public relations or communications. To be even more precise, you can determine what information needs to be shared at each level, such as crisis details, incident source, and potential consequences.
4. Assign Staff To Create Fact Sheets
Your crisis communication plan should specify who is responsible for creating fact sheets about the crisis. Fact sheets contain all the known information about the incident, helping to prevent misinterpretations, misinformation, and rumors among customers, staff, and the media.
Set a deadline for these sheets. Depending on the severity of the crisis, you may want them to be ready within 30 minutes to 24 hours. Ensure that the designated staff are equipped to gather and verify details quickly.
5. Outline Common Scenarios in Your Plan
The worst thing you can do in an emergency is to become overwhelmed by the flood of inquiries, social media mentions, or phone calls. That’s why it’s important to outline common scenarios in your plan. These scenarios could include natural disasters, product tampering, or injuries — situations that many businesses have encountered before.
Having a few examples at hand can guide your response and provide a starting point on how to handle your current situation. By preparing for these scenarios in advance, you can reduce stress and ensure you can respond in an organized manner during a crisis.
6. Identify Common Questions and Answer Them
During a crisis, people will start asking questions, and most of the time, companies are assumed guilty until proven innocent. Crisis management plans should anticipate and provide answers to common and expectable questions people may ask during these scenarios. For example, in case of a disaster, common questions may be “How long it will take for the company to resume normal functionality?” or “Was anyone injured during the incident?”
7. Determine Potential Risks
Even the best crisis communication plan will have its pros and cons. As such, go with a plan that minimizes drawbacks while maximizing benefits. When drafting your plan, think about the potential risks you may face in case the plan backfires. Being prepared with a backup strategy can help you get back up on your feet and avoid suffering additional losses.
8. Address Social Media Guidelines
Be proactive during a crisis. Transparency can mean a lot, and your teams should focus on preparing press materials and sharing them across your channels. The less information you provide, the more people will speculate.
Also, be reactive. Assign team members who will monitor your social presence during the crisis to address negative mentions immediately. The answers should be consistent, and for the best effect, should be disclosed in your plan as a part of a social media crisis management strategy.
3 Examples of Crisis Communication Scenarios and Countermeasures
Before we conclude, here are three examples of organizations that faced a crisis. How did they handle the situation? Read on to find out:
1. Burger King
In 2019, Burger King was sued by a vegan customer who claimed that the fast-food chain misled consumers regarding its new Impossible Burger. The plaintiff alleged that the advertising was unclear about the burgers being entirely meat-free, even though they were cooked on the same grill as the rest of their meat products.
The restaurant denied the allegations and awaited the legal process to unfold. A year later, the case was dropped due to a lack of evidence.
Burger King’s responses were successful. The brand allowed the crisis to run its course without unnecessary interventions and was also highly professional after the case’s dismissal.
2. Amazon
In 2021, Amazon received criticism after a tornado devastated one of its warehouses in Illinois. This led to the tragic deaths of six workers. Reports surfaced speculating that employees were forced to continue working despite the tornado warnings, raising concerns about the company’s safety and health guidelines. To make matters worse, Jeff Bezos took nearly a day before publicly addressing the tragedy.
This situation highlights what not to do in a crisis. Instead of being a great example, Amazon’s case should serve more as a warning. Whenever such a tragic loss happens, expressing empathy right away will show compassion and concern towards your employees and their families, even if it cannot undo the harm.
3. Boeing
Boeing also faced a crisis in 2018 and 2019 when two of its 737 Max planes fatally crashed in Ethiopia and Indonesia within five months. The crashes resulted in the tragic loss of 346 lives. After the disasters, Boeing initially attributed the crashes to pilot error, but it was later revealed that faulty flight control software was the root cause.
As a repercussion, all 737 Max planes were grounded for 20 months while experts investigated what glitch caused the fatal accidents.
The company’s stock prices plummeted and the production of the 737 Max was halted. The air travel restrictions induced by the pandemic in 2020 also caused headaches and financial losses for the company.
To make matters worse, 737 models were grounded again in 2021 due to electrical problems. Boeing had to pay $2.5 billion to settle charges after it was revealed that the company hid these issues from safety experts.
Boeing’s crisis management serves as a cautionary tale on the importance of transparency. While nothing could have brought back the lost passengers, transparency from Boeing after the Indonesian accident could have possibly prevented the tragedy in Ethiopia. Boeing could’ve focused on addressing critical issues instead of trying to cover them up. To this day, the company is still dealing with the fallout.
Crisis Communication Plans Takeaways
Effective communication is the first step in managing any crisis. To minimize the damage, companies must create adequate response plans that prioritize transparency in their messaging. This involves being direct, sincere, and respectful of everyone’s privacy.
For that to happen, organizations must also establish dedicated teams to manage these situations and allocate resources to make amends where possible, take ownership, and protect customer confidence in your brand.
Crisis Communication Plan FAQs
1. Can one person handle all crisis communications?
It depends on the size of the organization, but in most cases, an entire team is needed to assess and monitor every possible digital and traditional communication touchpoint.
2. What’s the most important in crisis communication?
Timely responses and consistent messaging across all channels are the most important aspects of crisis communication. As such, it’s advisable to appoint a few key individuals who can address media inquiries and customer questions.
3. Are there crisis communication templates?
Yes, crisis communication templates are available online. You can either download them, use this article as a blueprint, or hire a PR agency to help you create a plan.
-preview.jpg)
