Ever wondered how businesses recover from public relations crises that threaten to destroy their brand? Well, amid the chaos, it's likely that each successful brand recovery had a crisis management plan behind it.
Dealing with a crisis without a plan could be just as harmful to your business as the crisis itself. Failure to address the issues, ease customer concerns, and appease stakeholders means you can make the situation a whole lot worse.
You can quickly look amateur and uncaring, which directly harms your brand health far more than the problem itself.
Whether it's a scandal involving an employee, a product recall, or a marketing disaster, businesses need a crisis management plan if they are to resume normal operations.
Crisis communications encompasses a wide range of issues, from dealing with customers to handling internal scandals. After all, a crisis can strike at any time, threatening your brand reputation, operations, and bottom line.
Businesses therefore develop crisis management plans to help preempt the chaos and respond to unexpected events quickly and effectively.
What Is a Crisis Management Plan?
A crisis management plan is your roadmap for handling these unexpected events that could harm your organization. It's the central document any team member can look at and understand how to respond to problems.
Creating a plan involves three things:
Identifying potential risks
Developing response strategies
Assigning roles to team members
You also need to outline the best and worst outcomes from a crisis.
Using a crisis management plan template can help ensure that all key components, such as strategy, communications, and procedures, are included, making it easier to implement effective crisis management strategies.
This guide will help you develop that template, so you're ready to navigate any type of crisis.
Crisis Management and Business Continuity
The reason corporations need to plan for crisis scenarios is to ensure they maintain business continuity amidst the chaos. For example, a motor vehicle manufacturer may need to navigate a PR crisis when thousands of its cars are recalled due to a faulty part. This is a big problem, but a crisis management team also needs to focus on business continuity to ensure the brand remains healthy once the crisis is over.
Effective business continuity ensures that critical operations are maintained during and after a crisis. It's not easy to perfect, but it is doable.
In this guide, we'll explore the core components required for a robust crisis management plan that factors in successful business continuity. By creating a template, it's possible to deliver an effective crisis response every time and restore operations to normal as quickly as possible.
In This Guide:
The Crisis Management Planning Process: Step-by-step Guide
Types of Crisis Management Plans: Choosing the Right One for Your Business
Tools and Resources for Effective Crisis Management Planning
Common Mistakes in Crisis Management Planning (and How to Avoid Them)
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Crisis Management Plan
Real-world Examples of a Successful Crisis Management Plan
Frequently Asked Questions
The Crisis Management Planning Process: Step-by-step Guide
Creating a strong crisis management plan helps you handle tough situations and is the first step to maintaining critical business functions, even when chaos hits.
Let’s walk through the steps to build your plan.
1. Form a Crisis Team
First, form your crisis management team. If you're a large corporation, pick people from different departments who can lead during emergencies. Include folks from PR, legal, and operations. If you're a small team or are self-employed, then you'll need to lean on everyone's expertise, and perhaps do some further research into what crisis scenarios might occur.
2. Do Risk Analysis
Next, do a risk assessment. Look at possible problems your company might face. When we talk about crises, we're not really thinking about natural disasters – although that is what many people assume a crisis management plan is about. Instead, it's about preparing for PR nightmares, whether that be faulty products, customer complaints, cyber attacks, or criticism from media outlets.
Your risk assessment needs to factor in all crises that could befall your business. A sports team, for example, would need to consider its reputation if a player spoke out of line, or if its fans misbehaved at a game.
3. Map Your Immediate Response
Now that you've identified your crisis scenarios, it's time to outline how you’ll respond to each one. Document the process and create clear steps for your team to follow. Decide who will do what and when.
Plan how you’ll talk to employees, customers, and the media. Prepare clear messages for different situations.
For example, if there is an employee scandal, then your crisis management team will issue a template response explaining the corporation is learning about the issue and dealing with it internally. If said employee needs to be suspended, then this is the next point of the plan, while a dedicated team seeks to resolve the issue.
4. Practice Your Response
Run drills to test your plan and how it will be executed when a crisis occurs. Regularly assess and improve the crisis management process by measuring key metrics and gaining feedback post-crisis.
For example, practice who delivers the internal communications during a crisis, and who issues statements to external stakeholders. Liaise with those who have to deal with the actual crisis – human resource managers, line managers, or perhaps even external advisors – and figure out how this aligns with your communication strategy.
5. Review and Update
Lastly, keep your plan up to date. Review it after every practice response and make changes as needed. As your business grows, your crisis plan should too.
Types of Crisis Management Plans: Choosing the Right One for Your Business
There are various crisis management plans you can develop, depending on what your business needs. Each one has a risk assessment, but crucially they differ in terms of who needs to do what during a crisis.
After all, a snack bar in downtown Chicago doesn't need a stakeholder crisis management plan if its stock price plummets. Likewise, a global bank doesn't need a health crisis management plan.
Here are four plans that cover the majority of crisis response scenarios:
Operational crisis plans: These focus on keeping your business running during disruptions. They outline how to maintain critical business functions and essential operations when faced with challenges. It's the sort of thing a team needs in order to maintain business continuity.
Financial crisis plans: These help you navigate economic downturns or cash flow issues. It involves identifying where you might need to cut costs, seek funding, attract investment, or deal with regulatory agencies during cash shortages. It's all about keeping your business afloat.
Reputation management plans: These are crucial for protecting your brand image. It's all about developing communication strategies that guide your response to public relations crises, helping you maintain trust with customers and stakeholders. Media relations can greatly influence the outcome of a crisis. Get your key messaging wrong and a bad situation can be made much worse.
IT disaster recovery plans: This is a subset of an operational crisis plan, but it's so important that it deserves its own mention here. An organization's response to IT disasters can make or break the business. You might be dealing with people's sensitive data, so ensuring customer satisfaction remains high during an IT disaster is difficult. Your plan needs to outline procedures to restore systems and data after cyberattacks or technical failures, all while communicating with customers, stakeholders, and media outlets.
Remember, your crisis management plan should be tailored to your specific needs. Develop a list of all possible crises in a risk assessment and shape your company's response from there.
It might also be worth creating a combination of these plan types to cover all potential crises your business might face.
Tools and Resources for Effective Crisis Management Planning
Delivering a crisis response plan doesn't come from thin air. Teams spend a lot of time not only developing their plan but practicing how it will play out. To do this effectively, it's important to use crisis prevention tactics and monitoring software.
Your software needs to catch all mentions related to your brand, so you can act fast when problems hit. Cision's Crisis Communications Toolkit is a great place to reference.
Social media monitoring is also required to ensure you're ahead of the game and spot issues before they turn into crisis scenarios. For this, a tool like CisionOne can spot potential threats and help you respond fast.
There are some crises, such as a global pandemic or natural disasters, that require far-reaching contingency planning. For this, it's important to find an overarching communications platform that can pull in various crisis tools. This way you can monitor the physical response to a crisis, while also addressing the communications complexities that come with such instances.
>> Read more about crisis management tools here!
Common Mistakes in Crisis Management Planning (and How to Avoid Them)
A crisis management plan is only effective if you've put the hard work in to create a robust strategy and are willing to execute it.
You can spend hours crisis planning and creating the perfect risk management template, only for your employees to ignore it. Or you could have a willing crisis response team ready to execute your plan, only to find that it's not worth executing.
Below are some common mistakes senior management and employees make when dealing with crisis management.
Failing to identify potential risks: This is, of course, a major pitfall in crisis management planning. You need to brainstorm and list all possible threats to your organization and think outside the box. Every stakeholder, client, customer, or contact could bring risk into your company and upset any business continuity plan that you hope to develop. Be vigilant here.
Failing to form a communication strategy: This is a serious problem for many businesses. A crisis management team spends days creating a plan that they can execute, but fail to spread the message. This leads to internal confusion, while mixed messaging risks a public relations nightmare.
Failing to assign roles and responsibilities: This is part of the internal communication strategy and something that can seriously harm a business' crisis preparedness. Designate a crisis team and define each member’s duties to ensure everyone knows their part when trouble strikes.
Failing to update and review: Overlooking regular plan updates can leave you unprepared. Review and revise your crisis management plan at least annually. This keeps it relevant as your business and potential risks change.
Failing to simulate crises: You need to test whether your crisis management team can actually fulfill the plan you put in place. Failing to practice is a critical mistake, so be sure to run drills and simulations to test your team’s readiness. Crisis management training is crucial for preparing for unexpected emergencies and ensuring your team can respond effectively.
Failing to monitor the media: Ignoring the importance of media monitoring can leave you blindsided. Keep tabs on what’s being said about your brand to catch issues early.
Failing to evaluate: The end of a crisis can be a major relief for those who worked through it. However, the job doesn't stop there. It's important to undertake a post-crisis evaluation process to identify valuable learning opportunities. After each incident, assess what worked well and what needs improvement. Use these insights to strengthen your future crisis preparedness.
How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Crisis Management Plan
Software will be able to help you understand the effectiveness of your communication strategies when issues hit. You can track several key metrics to evaluate how well you've done, and what you need to do better next time.
Response time is the first metric to focus on. How quickly did your team activate the crisis management plan and begin addressing the issue?
The look at traditional media and social media sentiment before, during, and after a crisis. What did the newspapers and TV networks say about your brand? How did X and Instagram users view the crisis? This helps gauge public perception of your handling of the situation and including tracking mentions, comments, and overall tone.
Crises usually have a financial impact on brands, so compare revenue, stock price, and other financial indicators from before and after the storm. This shows how well you mitigated losses.
Finally, survey everyone to see what they thought about your response. Ask customers and employees for their views, and use this feedback to improve next time. It is also crucial to keep key stakeholders informed throughout the crisis management process to ensure effective communication and decision-making.
Real-World Examples of Successful Crisis Management Plans
Good crisis communication is often at the core of any successful management plan. Many brands have, over the years, displayed how you can do this effectively.
Starbucks, Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, and KFC UK are just three examples. Starbucks closed all its U.S. stores in 2018 over allegations of racial bias, while it worked with employees to improve education in this area.
Also in 2018, KFC UK endured a chicken shortage that caused some stores to close. However, the company's humorous social media response won over customers and showed how to handle a crisis with grace.
Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi successfully integrated an effective crisis management plan into its digital strategy when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It means the clinic could respond much faster to internal COVID-19 communications than others.
All three organizations were able to do the following in order to deliver smart crisis communication:
Act fast
Be transparent
Show empathy
Use social media wisely
To improve your crisis management skills, you might want to check out some crisis communication examples. They can give you ideas for your own crisis response procedures.
Frequently Asked Questions
Crisis management requires careful thought and customization in order to work for your business. Key aspects include tailoring for specific environments, having clear activation protocols, and evaluating effectiveness. You need a dedicated crisis management team that can implement your plan as soon as a problem hits.
This article has outlined how you can manage a crisis and implement a business continuity plan at the same time, to ensure your business is insulated from any major shocks.
However, if you want to know even more then we recommend exploring these commonly asked questions around crisis communication and planning.
Could you outline the activation protocol for responding to a crisis?
A business should have a clear strategy for activating a crisis management plan, whether it be for a public relations scandal, customer criticism, or response to a national disaster. Your plan needs to identify when a problem triggers a crisis response. For example, two disgruntled social media posts about your product wouldn't trigger a design change, but 10,000 dissatisfied customers and wide-ranging critical reporting in media outlets might.
Assign roles to team members and set up a communication tree, so everyone understands the immediate response. Create a checklist of immediate actions and establish a command center location – be it in the office, or one person's crisis software.
What critical steps should every crisis management plan encompass?
The first is to identify potential risks and form a crisis team to work through the response to each one. Develop response procedures and assess how they relate to your business operations. Then set up a communication plan and train staff so they know what to do when a crisis hits. Test and update the plan regularly, and ensure senior executives are looped in so it gets approval ahead of time.
How do you evaluate the effectiveness of a crisis management plan post-incident?
Using software to manage a crisis means you can evaluate everything in one place after the chaos has subsided. Crisis management team members can offer their insight and add data to your platform, so you get a full picture of what went right and wrong.
Gather feedback from all involved parties and review response times and actions taken.
Check if procedures were followed by looking back at your crisis communication plan. Did you relay the messages you needed? Was there confusion among stakeholders?
Assess this communication effectiveness and identify areas for improvement.
Then, update the plan based on your findings.