Why are crisis communications important?

Most people would recognise the need to communicate with stakeholders during a major incident or crisis, yet it’s surprising how many get it wrong.

The high-pressure environment during a crisis can easily lead to mistakes being made and communications being handling ineffectively or even ignored altogether.

Effective crisis communications can help to keep people safe, minimise damage and protect and repair reputations, so it’s important to get it right.

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

1. What are crisis communications?
2. How does crisis communication relate to PR?
3. How important are crisis communications?
4. When do you need crisis communications?
5. What happens when crisis communications go wrong?

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1. What are crisis communications?

Crisis communications are the way in which information relating to a potentially damaging incident for an individual, company, organisation, or the public is communicated. It may be that the crisis relates to an issue or event regarding public interest or safety. Or potentially the crisis in question could be a threat to the reputation of an organisation or individual.

Crisis management oversees how this threat is handled and aims to mitigate as much damage as possible. In ‘The Handbook of Crisis Communication’, Timothy Coombs says: “The reality of crises leads to the need for preparation and readiness to respond – crisis management. The critical component in crisis management is communication.”

Crisis communications are a vital cog in crisis management and are important to ensure stakeholders are well informed and aim to protect and defend those that the crisis relates to.

“The reality of crises leads to the need for preparation and readiness to respond – crisis management. The critical component in crisis management is communication.”

Timothy Coombs, ‘The Handbook of Crisis Communication’

Kathleen Fearn-Banks, in ‘Crisis Communications: A Casebook Approach’, describes crisis communications as: “The dialog between the organisation and its public prior to, during, and after the negative occurrence. The dialog details, strategies and tactics are designed to minimise damage to the image of the organisation.”

2. How does crisis communication relate to PR?

Crisis communications are an important part of public relations. How these communications are handled can have a huge impact on how the organisation or individual are perceived.

If handled well, they can improve the reputation of the company or individual, but if handled badly, or ignored altogether, the damage can be hard to recover from.

For big organisations and people in the public eye, seeking support for crisis communications from specialists in PR makes a lot of sense. PR specialists will be experienced in navigating the fallout from a crisis incident and can approach the communications from an objective point of view.

Effective communications require a measured response which is not always possible when you are the one at the eye of the storm.

3. How important are crisis communications?

“Crisis communications are critical to any incident,” says Nick Moon, Managing Director of Applied Resilience. “Most organisations that take their operations seriously should have some simple, rehearsed business resilience plans in place, with crisis comms a core plank.”

Ellen Forster, who previously worked as Social Media Manager for one of the UK’s biggest motor retailers, agrees: “Every PR department should have an understanding of crisis communications, even if they never actually have to deploy the strategy.”

Companies in the private sector can choose whether to respond publicly to a crisis. However, the impact of not responding to an incident that has captured public attention (or responding only when they are pressured in to doing so) can be very damaging to their reputation.

“Most organisations that take their operations seriously should have some simple, rehearsed business resilience plans in place, with crisis comms a core plank.”

Nick Moon, Managing Director of Applied Resilience

In the public sector, organisations have a legal duty to respond to major incidents.

Zara Martin, Head of COVID Testing at an NHS Trust, says: “Communication is one of the seven duties of the Civil Contingencies Act. The act was developed following several incidents where communication, or lack of, had huge negative implications. This is both communication between responders, and warning and informing the public prior to and during a crisis.”

For these organisations, mishandling of communications during a crisis, or failing to communicate at all, can have a much wider impact than just reputational damage. They play a huge role in keeping staff and the public, as well as the environment and wildlife, safe during an incident. It can have severe implications on public safety and lead to confusion and the spread of misinformation to not address the crisis directly.

When you factor in the prevalence of social media in the world today, and how quickly information can spread, it is vital that communications which reassure, explain and/or alert people to the information they need are readily available.

4. When do you need crisis communications?

It is important that crisis communications are as proactive as possible, which is why planning is so valuable.

Obviously, it’s hard to predict a crisis but having a plan to follow when a crisis occurs allows a much more strategic response. If the incident involves the public, they will want to be reassured that the matter is in hand. An unprepared, last-minute response is likely to cause concern and potentially unnecessary panic.

Most crisis communication methodologies will recommend tactics that cover:

• Pre-crisis – this will allow the individual or organisation some control over how people are informed initially of the impending incident. This needs to be approached carefully and appropriately, as if the crisis is then avoided you could have caused unnecessary concern. However, failing to alert them to something that does then occur can be damaging and potentially a risk to public safety.
• In-crisis – keeping up regular and relevant communications during the crisis is critical to ensure the relevant people stay informed and appropriate actions are taken.
• Post-crisis – once the initial crisis is over, it is important to continue certain communications. Now is the opportunity to reflect and improve on what worked and what didn’t for future incidents. Often there will be ongoing ramifications long after the main crisis has occurred. Closing the communications as soon as the main glare of the public view has shifted can still leave organisations vulnerable to reputational damage for handling the aftermath ineffectively.

5. What happens when crisis communications go wrong?

Failing to respond to a crisis can be very damaging for an organisation but communicating badly can be even worse. Despite happening more than 11 years ago, the 2010 BP oil rig explosion is still well recognised as an example of mishandled crisis communications.

The oil rig explosion leaked an estimated 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. BP’s initial response appeared to mislead the public by releasing facts that were later shown to be incorrect.

They also tried to distance themselves, push blame on to others and provided communications that seemed unprepared and inconsistent. This left BP with a hugely damaged reputation, without even considering the devastating effect of the explosion itself.

Whilst an incident with such far reaching environmental effects would have been hard to recover from, having a clear strategy for crisis communication may have helped to mitigate some of the reputational fall out for BP. This demonstrates how important it is to have a plan in place for handling communications in a crisis.

Taking the time to put together a strategy for crisis communications can avoid making critical mistakes should an incident occur.

For organisations in the public sector, where a crisis would likely fall under public scrutiny, ensuring a plan is in place is even more vital.

Read the other crisis communications blogs in our series:

And there’s more…

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