227: How to Write the Crisis Communication Plan You Need Right Now

When a natural disaster meets an operational crisis, you have a storm. I understand you just spoke directly with the CEO of Southwest Airlines. Did you get any explanation at all for this horrendous meltdown of epic proportions? Well, meltdown is the right word. This is an unacceptable situation. Welcome to the Indestructible PR podcast where we use current events and tested media and PR strategies to help prevent or manage a crisis and build an indestructible reputation. Even the biggest companies can be unprepared to handle a crisis. Southwest Airlines, known for its affordable prices and friendly service, recently suffered a PR disaster when a storm last December caused widespread outage and a lot of negative publicity. As a result, the faced intense criticism from customers and the public alike who shared their anger and disappointment through various channels on social media. And the same thing can happen to any business out there. This week on the podcast, make sure it doesn't happen to you. You're a company actively engaging or promoting on social media, but you do not have a plan in place. If someone attacks you or you're involved in some big disaster, it reveals a crack in your operations and people on social media take notice. That's why today it's essential for every business to have an effective and comprehensive crisis communication plan. Having a crisis plan in place can help your company handle any potential issue that may arise. Now I've written many it of crisis communication plans in my life. They keep changing because technology and social media keeps changing. I've had to update a crisis plan simply because Twitter is not as much of the go to social media channel as it used to be. So it's important that if you're a company operating nowadays and you don't even have to be a big huge company like a Southwest Airlines, you could be a small business, a brand. You could be a one person brand. It is important to have a crisis communication plan in place because a well crafted plan is going to enable your organization to quickly respond to any crisis and protect your brand from harm. So in this podcast let's talk about how you can create a crisis communication template for 2023 so by the end of the episode you will know what you need to have in place to start writing your own plan. The first step is defining what constitutes a crisis. You want to determine what a crisis is in the context of your business. Now, it can vary greatly between organizations, so it's important to develop that clear definition of when and how a crisis can occur. You want to remember a crisis can have both internal and external factors. Both can cause significant damage or disruption to operations. So once you've identified those potential crises, you can begin the process of creating an effective template. Now, one piece of a crisis plan that most people do not distinguish is the difference between a disaster and disaster communication and a PR crisis. Those are two very different things to describe them. In short, if I had to explain them, disaster communication, incident management. When you are dealing with a major event, that is think multi agency. So if you are an organization, if you, you know, state, local, federal, if you're a school district, a hospital, many of those organizations are familiar with an incident command system. When multi agencies are all involved in one big disaster, you'll see this in tornadoes and hurricanes, wildfires. You'll see it in a shooting like in Texas, Uvalde. The reason why we all know about the breakdown and what happened with Uvalde is because they were not following a plan. Those are usually considered like disaster communications, like incident management. But most companies nowadays are dealing with a crisis like that public relations crisis, where you need to engage a crisis communication plan. And those PR crisis are often tied into an operational crisis. There's something that happened in your operations that caused the crisis. Now, it can be something internal. It could be something with leadership. Maybe you had a CEO do something, maybe a member of your board did something, maybe there was an employee, an employee could have been involved in embezzlement, There could be a sexual harassment, there could be, this is awful. But a workplace incident, there could be a death, there could be a shooting, an active shooting, there could be a cyber attack. There could be a huge mobilization against your organization or person at your organization happening online. There could be a Facebook page against you. That is big. In short, a crisis is typically this event that interrupts or disrupts operations. That's how you want to look at it. So most of you listening to this podcast right now, you're going to fall in the latter category. And you want to have a plan for what happens with operations. Now you want to create a template. So once you've identified whatever your potential crisis is, you want to have a template for that plan. And so it should include all the necessary steps required to respond effectively and efficiently if any event were to occur. So you want to identify what the key events that could happen and how they affect key personnel. So identify the personnel who's going to be responsible for responding and also the strategies for preparing your messages and how to distribute them appropriately. So additionally, your template should outline measures that will be taken during a crisis situation in order to ensure consumer Safety, customer safety, member safety, fan safety, whatever your organization is and provide the support when needed. Needed. What I'm giving you right now, when I say the word template, is the first step in creating your own plan is just to create your own template. Don't write the plan, first write what you need in the plan. So these first steps that we talked about were just identifying your area, what your area focuses in your business, who your stakeholders are. You know, you want to find out who do you impact if operations were to cease or if there was some type of operational disruption. Next thing you want to have in this plan is deciding who is on your crisis response team. You will need to assemble some form of a team that's composed of key stakeholders across your organization or your business. So that will be senior management, it will be legal, it'll be marketing. It could be it depending on your business, could be someone working in safety, maybe engineering, Anyone that might be front facing with the. Every person in that team should have their clear roles and responsibilities. Everyone needs to know what to do in the event of a crisis. And so once you have that team in place, you need to start developing that plan. Your plan. This is when you get into the meat of the communication. This is where you need your clear messaging to communicate with your audience during a crisis. I in my plan said do a stakeholder map to find out who the stakeholders are across all different areas. And a stakeholder is a very detailed map. It's not just our customers, but it could be customers that live here or live there, or customers impacted by X and not impacted by Y. It could be the press. Local national stakeholders make up just audiences where if your organization was in crisis, who is impacted by your crisis, you should also consider who your target audience is, you know, and how you're going to. So this may involve creating a social media strategy, which in most cases it is. It's also updating your website. Do you have a hotline for people to call? Are you a business that even has a phone anymore? When it comes to social media too, you need to determine which channel is your primary channel. For many of my clients it's still Facebook, it is still Facebook. Nowadays for big organizations, it's Twitter, right? Like when we think of emergency management, disaster communications, we think of Twitter. The media goes to Twitter, the press lives there. That's where you can do a lot of management. You can post statements up there. But nowadays with Twitter, it's a little bit erratic, right? Not as many people use it. We don't know the numbers of how many people left? I'm just making a statement off the cuff there, but I believe it. If I were to dig and find the numbers, I bet the numbers have gone down significantly. And also even in light of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, the devastating earthquakes, a story came out today in the New York Times. I retweeted it about Twitter going down. So imagine an earthquake of that magnitude and you don't have Twitter as a social media channel now. It's different circumstances in Turkey and Syria than it is in the U.S. but still, you never know. We can't rely now on Elon Musk's social media channel to be our primary. So I'll tell you if you're listening to my voice right now, I used to have in my plan that Twitter was a very primary social media channel. I don't have that anymore. I have Twitter in there definitely. But I have other mechanisms in place to make sure that you can reach your customers channels that you own. Another aspect to a crisis communication plan is having monitoring and evaluation in place. This will help you keep track of what's being said about your organization on social media and other platforms for you to be able to respond. All right, next you want to have your strategies and tactics. The strategy, how I always remember, it's my cheat. She strategy is the how. Okay. Strategy is always just the H. I always imagine like an H, an S sitting in an H. That's how I always know about strategies is how you're going to do something. And then the tactics are the very specific things that you're going to do. How are we going to do it? We're going to have outreach with the media. Whether what are the tactics? Press releases, you know, that's the difference. So it could be a phone call or press release or email or social media post. You want to outline whatever the process is and how you're monitoring feedback from customers, consumers and other stakeholders so you'll be able to respond to them promptly. And the final part of your plan is you want to have a post crisis communication part to that plan. It means figuring out how you'll communicate with your audience once the crisis has passed. So this could include a follow up statement, a press release or even a customer survey. The goal is to demonstrate your commitment to transparency and accountability, particularly if it's an operational crisis. You want to make sure that you take the steps prevent from a similar crisis from happening in the future. So there you have it. Those are just the key components of a crisis communication plan. You're not going to write a communication plan from this podcast, but you're definitely going to get a sense of what needs to be in it. Now, I know it seems overwhelming whenever you think about a crisis communication plan. You think about hiring a firm and paying them tens of thousands of dollars to put a plan together. And not for nothing, as an aside, in December, I went out with someone who was telling me they engaged a company, a well known company, for a crisis communication plan. Now, I could not help myself. I thought, I am not leaving this table until I find out how much this person paid for that crisis communication plan. So I asked. I got there delicately. But first I asked, well, how big is the plan? And the plan was the same amount of pages that I have in my plan. The same amount of pages. And then I asked for the specifics. You know, what is in the plan? And then I'm being told what's in the plan. I thought, gee, it's the same plan that I do for my clients. And when they told me how much they paid for it, I, oh my gosh, I almost fell out of my chair. Oh my goodness. So my first thought was, wow, I do not charge enough for my crisis communication plans. But then my second thought is, honestly, honestly, anyone can write their own plan. You can write your own plan. It's one of these things that everybody assumes that you have to have an outside firm do it, you can do it yourself. Now, in every episode, I always include one indestructible PR tip. It's a very easy to remember takeaway that will help you build your indestructible reputation. And here it is. Do not not go into the second quarter of 2023 without a crisis communication plan. Make it a goal to have one finished by the end of second quarter. If you hear that and think, no way, impossible. I could never, ever do that, or I'm going to have to listen this podcast on repeat. And you don't need to, because I have you covered. I am offering a special live tutorial workshop for how you can write your own crisis communication plan. As I said, you could pay a firm tens of thousands of dollars to write one on your behalf to come into your company. Drop in and figure out how your company works. Or you could just do it yourself. Go to the experts, and that's the people in the building who understand everything about your business. All you need is a plan. You need a basic plan and a template, just like a blueprint for how to write your own plan. And I can teach you how to do that. So you can join me on February 28th. It's the workshop is a one hour workshop starts at 11am Eastern Time. If you are interested in joining me on February 28th, you can head over to my website at Molly mcpherson.com Crisis Template or you can go to the link in the Show Notes. I hope to see you there. That's all for this week on the podcast. Bye for now.