Crisis situations encompass potentially devastating circumstances such as natural disasters, the hacking of personal information, fiduciary breaches, man-made disasters, such as workplace violence, product contamination, environmental catastrophes and widespread disease outbreaks that affect operations.
Our crisis planning management team represents a variety of backgrounds such as media, political, public and private sector. We know from experience how to quickly evaluate a situation, develop first-line response and manage short- and long-term outcomes.
We have developed pre-emptive plans and re-actively managed crisis situations for utilities, government, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare systems, educational institutions, manufacturing operations, chemical companies, hazardous materials and others who have the potential for and/or experienced a full-scale crisis.
Crisis Management
Many organizations do not have the budget nor the time to develop full-scale crisis plans and often find themselves in the midst of responding to a situation that requires immediate communications attention – but with a dire need to devote attention to addressing the situation vs. the communications aspect.
In this case, you need a team with a cool-head who can quickly evaluate the situation and help manage the communications process. Much of what we do is a thorough, but expedited elements of crisis planning – identifying audiences, developing primary messaging and stand-by statements, as we move into longer-term implementation.
Crisis Planning
When working with our clients to develop crisis communications plans, we bring your operational and public-facing leadership to the table to ensure a comprehensive approach.
- Identification of crisis scenarios
- Identification of the core crisis management team, including executives, internal PR team, representatives from affected divisions and/or operations and in many cases, legal
- Review of internal communications structure
- Review of operational structure and public facing employees to gain a better knowledge of how the two work together
- Identification, segmentation and prioritization of audiences, including: employees, influencers, board members, elected and regulatory officials, media, social media and other key audiences – as well as those who operate by word-of mouth