How to manage crisis communications

Treating your crisis communications as an essential part of your overall business strategy, rather than an afterthought, ensures a considered and appropriate response, should an incident occur.

This makes managing crisis communications during a real-time incident much more effective, as a lot of the groundwork should already have been done and just needs to be adapted to the current situation.

Planning effective crisis management takes time and, as the Covid-19 pandemic shows, not all businesses are prepared enough to respond as quickly as needed.

We’re going to look at three main areas of managing crisis communications in this blog:

1. What is crisis communications management?
2. How to successfully manage crisis communications
3. The dos and don’ts of managing crisis communications

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1. What is crisis communications management?

Crisis communications management is how your communications during an incident are handled and implemented.

In ‘The Handbook of Crisis Communication’, Robert L. Heath explains: “The goal of management and communication is to prevent harm to others and to be accountable. Such endeavours have a proactive challenge to know, understand, and be able to identify and mitigate conditions that lead to crisis.”

One of the first steps when developing your crisis communications strategy is to appoint a team to manage the communications during an incident. This team normally includes staff already working within the organisation in a communications or emergency planning function, although you can outsource part or all of the management of your crisis communications.

The roles of everyone involved in the crisis communications team should be clearly set out and defined as part of the strategy, including who needs to give final approval on communications.

“The goal of management and communication is to prevent harm to others and to be accountable. Such endeavours have a proactive challenge to know, understand, and be able to identify and mitigate conditions that lead to crisis.”

Robert L. Heath, ‘The Handbook of Crisis Communications’

When an incident occurs, the crisis communications team will review plans and identify the correct strategy to implement. This team will work with relevant stakeholders to ensure the communications are managed effectively, with minimal disruption and to ensure the safety of anyone potentially at risk.

Having a strategy and team already in place can ensure the incident is approached with a measured response, helping to mitigate any reputational damage. When the matter involves a public sector organisation, approaching the incident in this way helps the public to feel assured that it is being handled correctly.

The impact of mismanaging communications during a crisis cannot be underestimated. It can cost an individual or organisation in time, money and reputational damage that can be hard to recover from. In very serious incidents, mishandling communications can put public safety at risk.

2. How to successfully manage crisis communications

There are many different strategies that can be employed to manage your crisis communications. The strategy that you use should be dependant on the incident that has occurred and your overall goals for your crisis communications.

An Emergency Planning Officer, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “If you’re a chemical manufacturing plant, an on-site incident could pose a health threat to staff/locals/wildlife and be hugely reputational, whereas a pandemic like we’ve seen recently is more of an ongoing reassurance exercise.”

Nick Moon, Managing Director of Applied Resilience, who support the public and private sector on resilience planning and response, explains: “There are lots of elements to managing a crisis communications response successfully, not least having strong emergency arrangements in place to assess, monitor and manage the impact of any disruption. Crisis communications will not be in any way effective if, as an organisation, it is not clear what is happening and what the plan is.”

“Crisis communications will not be in any way effective if, as an organisation, it is not clear what is happening and what the plan is.”

Nick Moon, Managing Director of Applied Resilience

It is likely that preserving reputation will always be one of the goals, but a reassurance campaign will be approached very differently than an incident that has brought a company or individual into disrepute.

Experts like Timothy Coombs and William Benoit have written extensively on theories surrounding crisis communications and highlight that the wrong strategy can do more harm than good.

For instance, if a high-profile public figure is accused of misconduct, a strategy of denial or pushing blame elsewhere are only likely to be successful if they are proved to be innocent. Whilst it might seem a good idea to deny all responsibility initially, if the claims are proved to be true, it will look worse that the individual tried to cover it up and scapegoat someone else.

A strategy that is apologetic and takes ownership of what they done may not save their reputation completely but will likely look more favourably on them and may mitigate any further potential damage being done.

3. The dos and don’ts of managing crisis communications

Nick Moon gives us an example of a company that managed their crisis communications effectively. “A classic example of where things went well is with the KFC campaign during their distribution crisis. Good work between resilience planners and comms teams ensured that some groundwork had been done and the use of an embedded specialist agency helped make the award-winning campaign so successful.”

What to do:

Have a plan for your crisis communications and treat them as an essential part of your business operations.
Review your plans regularly and update them as needed.
Keep control of the situation as much as possible.
Run tabletop exercises to test plans and adapt them as needed.
Make sure crisis communications are an integral part of resilience planning.
Ensure everyone involved in implementing the plan is aware of their role and responsibilities.
Plan communications at all levels and prepare templates where possible.
Ensure access to relevant or necessary policies is as easy as possible to save time.
Keep communications simple and easy to understand. People don’t need to be, or have time to be, deciphering unfamiliar jargon during a crisis.
Use the organisation’s website to direct people to for information. Having a single source where the facts are outlined and communicating this to everyone can reduce the risk of people getting information from unreliable sources.

Back in 2009, Domino’s USA was at the centre of a YouTube scandal when two employees uploaded a video of themselves purposely preparing pizzas unhygienically and then sending them out to customers. Dominoes initially waited over two days to respond to the scandal. While the employees in question were fired, their hesitancy in responding was damaging to the pizza giant’s reputation.

What not to do:

Just hope the crisis will go away. That’s unlikely to happen so it is better to get ahead of it and deal with it proactively.
Push blame on to others or try to evade responsibility. If you or your organisation is at fault, own it. Anything else will look worse in the long run.
React too quickly. Even under pressure, find the time to really consider your communications before signing off on them. A miscommunication will cost you in a lot more than just time.
Ignore emotional responses. Whilst it might be tempting to stick with logic and reason, if public safety is a concern, then people often react emotionally. Communications should be sympathetic to the emotions that people may be experiencing.
Ignore social media or underestimate the damage misinformation can do. Undoing the damage of poor information spread online is far more time consuming than preventing it in the first place.
Wait too long to act. You will need to be as proactive as possible, so even if things don’t seem that bad initially, start to address the incident before it gets worse.
Give out confusing or contradictory messages. The only thing worse than not communicating in a crisis at all is sending out mixed messages. This will likely confuse and even anger people and may put public safety at risk.

Effective crisis communications management can mean the difference between a well-handled campaign and irreparable reputational damage. Ensure you don’t overlook crisis communications by integrating them into your business continuity strategy.

Read the other crisis communications blogs in our series: