Anyone in charge of communications in a business needs a crisis communication plan. Problems can strike at any time – day or night – and failure to prepare for the unexpected can lead to disastrous consequences.
We're not really talking about natural disasters or nationwide crises here. This guide aims to help public relations professionals deal with crises so that their company's reputation survives the onslaught.
For example, a makeup brand might need to act if a crisis occurs around one of their social media influencers. Having a strategy to react in the moment is crucial, especially when reputations can rise and fall in an instant on social media.
Having a solid crisis communication plan is therefore necessary if you are to properly prepare for, act during, and review a crisis.
Understanding Crisis Communication Plans
The point of this guide is to help you prepare for problems by developing your knowledge of crisis communication plans.
The plan itself can be your roadmap for handling unexpected events that can harm your organization's reputation. It's a crucial tool for businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies alike.
In fact, crisis communication sits under a wider crisis management plan that will see you through the most difficult of times.
Speed is really important here, so your crisis communications need to be comprehensive. Your plan outlines who does what, when, and how. It covers key messages, spokespersons, and communication channels.
Having a crisis communication plan ready helps you:
Respond quickly and consistently
Protect your brand image
Keep stakeholders informed
Minimize negative impacts
Your plan should identify potential crisis scenarios. These might include:
Product recalls
Negative customer feedback
Data breaches
Employee misconduct
Influencer scandals
Each scenario needs to be mapped out with a communication checklist, so you know what to do when the crisis hits. Include templates for press releases, social media posts, and web stories. Have a brief on what a spokesperson needs to say at press conferences, or when speaking to the media. This saves precious time when every minute counts.
Don't forget internal communication, too. Your employees need to know what's happening, while regular training and drills are essential. Miss this step and your crisis communication fails from the inside, regardless of what happens externally. Your employees help your team stay prepared and confident.
All of this info needs to be pulled into a single crisis communication plan that can be used and updated time and again. Now it's time to look at these plans in more detail and show how you can deliver effective public communications when your brand is under pressure.
In This Guide:
What's in a Crisis Communication Plan?
Step-by-step Guide to Creating a Crisis Communication Plan
Best Practices for Crisis Management
After the Crisis: Evaluating and Improving Your Response
Real-world Examples of Effective Crisis Communication
Frequently Asked Questions
What's in a Crisis Communication Plan?
Let's start by breaking this all down. A solid crisis communication plan is made up of a few crucial elements, including:
Crisis Team: These are the key personnel who will handle communications during a crisis. This team should include PR professionals, executives, and subject matter experts.
Stakeholder Analysis: Your plan needs a list of your internal and external stakeholders. Think about key stakeholders such as employees, customers, investors, and the media. Know who needs to be informed and when, and draft a few template statements.
Communication Channels: This is where your crisis communications actually get distributed. You need to think about the best ways to reach each stakeholder group. The obvious ones are email, social media, press releases, or internal messaging platforms. However, you might also need to send out messages to key stakeholders or organize phone calls to big investors. Everything needs to be mapped out.
Messaging Templates: As we just mentioned, templates are needed to contact various people during various scenarios. Draft statements can be quickly customized when needed, saving precious time during a crisis.
Spokesperson Designation: Your team needs a spokesperson. They must be trained individuals who can confidently speak on behalf of your organization and absorb knowledge about the crisis that's unfolding. They should be prepared to handle tough questions and stay on message.
Response Protocols: This is part of your crisis templating. You need clear steps for assessing a situation and determining the appropriate level of response. Assign jobs for each stage, as it helps ensure a swift, coordinated effort.
Contact List: Maintain an up-to-date list of all team members, stakeholders, and media contacts that you can rely on when you need to activate your crisis communication plans. You need a full view of everyone who might be involved. Think, too, about multiple ways to reach each person.
Media Monitoring: Finally, your crisis communication plans need a tool to track mentions of your brand across various platforms. Otherwise you won't know if your crisis communication is working correctly. This also allows you to respond quickly to developing situations, and be in a better position to evaluate afterwards, using the data you've obtained.
This may feel like a lot, but your company may already have much of this in place. The point of your plan is to pull everything together into one cohesive unit, which can work in a proactive way.
By incorporating these elements into your crisis communication plan, you’ll be better equipped to handle unexpected challenges and protect your organization’s reputation.
Step-by-step Guide to Creating a Crisis Communication Plan
Now that we know what needs to go into a crisis communication plan, it's time to visualize its creation. As with any plan, you need to start by forming a crisis team. You might already have this established with your crisis management plan – and your crisis communication team may be a subset of that.
Either way, pick key people from different departments who can handle tough situations and know how to stay on message. Make sure everyone knows their role.
Next, identify potential crises your company might face. Your role here isn't to resolve the crisis but ensure you communicate properly. So, think about what could go wrong in your industry and what you would say as a response.
For example, lifestyle brands need a crisis communication plan to prepare for criticism of their products. The marketing team might do amazing work in promoting a new eyeliner, only to then receive criticism online after it emerges the eyeliner isn't ethically produced. In this instance, the crisis communication plan would need to be activated. It's therefore smart to plan ahead and understand what's potentially over the horizon.
Once you know what crises might be coming, it's time to build out the plan with a contact list. Use a simple spreadsheet for this, which can be linked to your plan document.
Develop clear messaging for each crisis type and create a network of what recipients need to be told which info. For example, if our lifestyle brand does encounter a PR crisis regarding its eyeliner, the message that is created for informing customers will be different to what you say to investors.
Next, set up your communication channels. Decide how you’ll reach employees, customers, and the media. At this stage, you're all set with most of the plan in place.
Now, it's time to practice the plan. Run drills to test how well your team works together. Simulate a PR crisis and look at what happens when, for example, your messaging goes off script. This helps you spot weak points and improve your response.
Review and update your plan often. As your business changes, so should your crisis strategy. Stay ready for new challenges that might come up.
Remember, a good crisis plan can save your reputation. It helps you act fast and smart when trouble hits. With these steps, you’ll be ready to face any crisis head-on.
Best Practices for Crisis Management
You can do a lot of work creating a crisis communication plan, but the only way it will be effective is if everyone commits to the process. This is about establishing best practices, so that your strategy works exactly as you anticipated.
Here are some practices you need to nail down when crisis communication planning, so that they don't become obstacles when problems occur:
Acting Fast
You need to act fast and smart. Start by gathering accurate information about what’s happening. Speak to those in the department where the crisis is emerging and liaise with the crisis management team. Don’t rush to respond without facts. You can practice this by simulating a crisis and communicating with the right teams.
Assessing Your Team
Your crisis communication plan is likely to be part of a wider crisis management plan that deals with an issue. Both require team members who bring skills to the table. Include people from public relations, legal, and leadership. You need to manage external communications effectively while ensuring internal stakeholders are also in the loop.
Creating Clear Messages
Be sure to craft a clear, consistent message that is used throughout the crisis. Your customers, employees, and the public need to hear from you – but they also need consistency. It's best to have one person responding to everything, if that's possible. Be honest and transparent about the situation.
Using Multiple Communication Channels
Posting your crisis response on social media and hoping everyone will see it isn't good enough. You need to use multiple channels to share updates, depending on your audience. Post on social media, send emails, and make phone calls. Get these communications right and everyone can stay in the loop.
Prioritizing Safety
Crises often come with risks. We're not necessarily talking about health hazards here, but crises can create major strain and stress. Employees and customers need to be prioritized. Be sure your crisis communications don't make things worse for them.
Being Proactive
Hiding when a crisis hits can ruin your brand reputation. Be proactive with the media and issue press releases and offer interviews to control the narrative. Don’t hide from tough questions.
Listening to Audiences
A crisis can spark when you least expect it and no business can fully determine what's around the corner. So, when a problem strikes, listen to who is raising the issue. Monitor social media and set up ways for people to contact you. Respond quickly to show you care.
After the Crisis: Evaluating and Improving Your Response
Crises that affect brand reputation can be over in hours, or be so bad that they ruin a company. In this section, we're going to assume you successfully recovered from a problem and are now in the post-crisis stage.
It's time to review what happened and improve how you communicate next time.
Start by gathering your crisis team for a candid discussion. What worked well? Where did you stumble? Be honest – this isn’t about pointing fingers, but learning and improving.
Next, review all the communications you sent out during the crisis. Did your messages hit the mark? Were they clear and consistent? Look at social media engagement, press coverage, and stakeholder feedback to gauge how your words landed.
You will almost certainly pinpoint good areas and bad areas here. Determine which ones you can improve and get to work.
Here’s a simple framework for evaluating your crisis response:
Speed: How quickly did you react?
Accuracy: Was your information correct?
Transparency: Were you open and honest?
Empathy: Did you show genuine concern?
Use what you’ve learned to update your crisis plan. Maybe you need better monitoring tools, clearer roles, or more spokespeople. Whatever the lessons, make sure they’re incorporated into your playbook.
Real-world Examples of Effective Crisis Communication
Responding to a crisis isn't always easy and there are plenty of examples of how to do it. Below are three recent issues where companies managed to communicate effectively:
1. Marriott International
Marriott International faced huge challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. They had to deal with business losses, layoffs, and financial problems. The situation wasn't unique to them, but they handled it better than many other companies. Marriott's CEO made a video to talk directly to employees and guests. He was honest about the issues and shared plans to help staff.
2. KFC
What happens when you run out of chicken? KFC UK faced this crisis in 2018 and they quickly put out a funny ad saying “FCK” instead of “KFC”. People loved it. The chicken shortage actually drove more people to KFC once their restaurants got fresh produce in.
3. Slack
Messaging app Slack suffered a fairly large outage in 2021, which was detected all over the world. This caused some serious communication headaches among company employees who rely on Slack to get their work done. Slack had to activate their own crisis communications plan to alleviate the worries of subscribers. Their crisis communications focused on keeping users updated on X and explaining what was happening, while others in the wider crisis management team got to work fixing the problem. Slack's tone was friendly and professional, which matched their brand identity as being a place for collaborative work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Now, let's look at some of the big questions those trying to create a crisis communication plan ask during the fact-finding stage. Effective crisis communication isn't achieved overnight but your plan can act as the template you need to get a comprehensive list of actions in place.
Remember, a crisis communication plan helps organizations respond quickly and effectively when emergencies arise. These common questions below cover key aspects of creating and implementing a successful plan, so that your crisis communication runs as smoothly as possible.
What key elements should be included in a comprehensive crisis communication plan?
Your crisis communication plan requires several crucial components, including:
A clear chain of command showing who makes decisions
A list of key members, including leaders in public relations and comms
An outline of steps for assessing the situation and crafting messages
Templates for different crisis scenarios
Employee guidelines to follow during emergencies
How can companies identify and prepare for potential risks that may require a crisis communication response?
You can spot potential risks a few ways, the biggest of which is to conduct a risk assessment to pinpoint vulnerabilities in your operations. You can also monitor industry trends and past crises at similar companies. Get input from employees across departments about concerns, so you can look ahead. Create detailed response plans for the most likely scenarios and then run crisis simulations to test your readiness.
What are the best practices for training spokespersons in the event of a crisis?
Spokespeople need to be fully briefed and embedded into your crisis communications plan. They require regular media training sessions to practice fielding tough questions. They have to learn your key messages and how to stay on topic.
Do mock interviews and press conferences to build confidence, and make sure they know what info they can and can't share. Crisis communications often shift during all the chaos, so spokespeople need to be constantly briefed.
How should a crisis communication plan be structured to ensure quick and efficient response?
Structure your plan for speed and clarity. It needs a one-page summary of key steps, with further detail set out in sections afterward. Use a clear hierarchy showing who does what and include checklists for initial actions.
You then need your contact lists arranged by crisis type.
After that, include the message templates that will form the basis of all crisis communication coming from your brand. Make the plan accessible digitally for quick reference.
Can you suggest effective methods for monitoring and assessing the impact of a crisis on a brand's reputation?
Of course! There are several tools you can use to track your brand's reputation during a crisis.
To start, use social media monitoring software to catch mentions and sentiment. Branch out and monitor media coverage too with a tool like CisionOne to get the full perspective of the crisis event as it plays out.
Be proactive when talking to employees and other stakeholders, to ensure they're happy despite the ongoing crisis. Then check your company's KPIs – sales, conversions, etc. – and see if those have been affected.
If they have, then you need to work with your product and marketing team members to work on solutions that will return you to financial stability. While you do this, it's also imperative you keep responding to a crisis, using smart public communications.
