Crisis communications

An organisation in a crisis needs writers at every stage. Managing the crisis turns on knowing how serious it is, preparing the team, the approval process and a standby statement before anything happens, watching for what is coming, and responding quickly, truthfully and with one voice.

What a crisis is

A crisis is an event that occurs suddenly and unexpectedly and requires a quick response, and depending on how it is handled, it can have a negative impact on an institution or can preserve and even enhance the institution's reputation. ¹

The Tylenol poisoning case of 1982 has been called the perfect example of a crisis handled well, but by 2015 social media and instant reactions left organisations less time to respond than the manufacturer had 33 years earlier. ² The goal of a public relations professional handling a crisis needs to be to "just shut it down", and a company rarely comes out of a crisis better off than before it started. ²

Crises fall into three tiers, high, medium and low, and each tier requires a different type of response. ² A high-level crisis involves the organisation itself and can damage its business or reputation. ² A medium-level crisis can quickly turn into something bigger and needs careful monitoring. ² A low-level crisis is generally happening elsewhere in the industry but could become an issue for the organisation. ²

Writers are needed in a crisis: at each stage many materials have to be developed in a very short time, which may include key messages, press releases and social media statements. ²

Whatever the scale, managing a crisis takes three steps: prepare, monitor and respond. ²

Preparing

Preparing means answering questions about the organisation before a crisis hits: ³

• Who is on the crisis team, and do its members understand their roles and responsibilities?
• What is the approval process for the response plan?
• Are there third-party groups the organisation can draw on in a crisis, and friends in the industry or elsewhere who would be willing to speak on its behalf?
• What kinds of issue constitute a crisis, and how might they involve the organisation?
• Which media and other communication channels are available to get the message across?
• What general key messages or position will help develop the response?

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Once these questions are answered, a simple chart should lay out the response team, the approval process and possible messaging for the most likely scenarios. ³ An example of such a chart, for making sure everyone is on the same page, sets out three situations: ⁴

Situation	Threat level	Rapid-response team	Approval process	Sample core messaging
Suicide of a patient	Red	Chief executive, legal, communications	One-step approval by all team members	Two or three bullet points for each situation
Accusations of improprieties by a healthcare worker	Red	Chief executive, legal, communications	One-step approval by all team members	Draw on the company's mission and vision
Accusation of improprieties by an investor	Yellow	Chief executive, chief financial officer, legal, communications	Three-step approval process

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It is also advisable to prepare a standby statement for the press for each likely crisis. ³ It should be short and simple while still conveying the message the organisation is trying to get across in that situation. ³ Two sentences is probably the ideal length, because a statement that is too long tends to make the media wonder what is being hidden behind flowery or technical language. ³

Preparation in advance should involve knowing where management stands on basic issues before a crisis occurs, discussing crisis plans and exposing managers to hypothetical situations to test their reactions, preparing for a press conference and anticipating the questions the media may ask, avoiding the no-comment reaction and avoiding jargon, using every means of communication, and learning from experience. ¹

Monitoring

Once prepared, an organisation must know what is going on, and monitoring is how it knows. ⁵ No one gives warning that a crisis is coming, so the organisation needs to be constantly on the lookout for stories about events that might affect it. ⁵ When relevant news appears, the situation should be analysed to determine both the key messages and what is being left out. ⁵ Elements missing from news reports might indicate that reporters do not understand something. ⁵

Responding

When a crisis hits, the response has to come quickly and efficiently. ^{6, 1} It should come without panic, and instinct should be trusted: a statement that feels bad should not be made. ^{7, 8} One crisis communicator puts emphasis on communicating early, even when the cause of the crisis is unknown: responding that the subject is under investigation is better than not responding at all. ¹

A no-comment strategy can have negative consequences, as a case at a veterans' hospital shows: a surgeon mistakenly implanted radioactive seeds in the healthy bladder of a patient rather than in the cancerous prostate, rewrote the protocol with the regulators' consent to match the number of seeds actually implanted in the correct organ, and then committed several similar mistakes on other patients, some of which were not reported. ¹

In the pet-food contamination crisis, the manufacturer decided on a major recall three days after the first report of acute renal failure in cats, and then needed a series of tests and several weeks to identify the cause: melamine, used to artificially increase the protein content of wheat gluten, which precipitated in the kidneys in combination with cyanuric acid and produced fatal renal failure. ¹ The positive actions the manufacturer took included a prompt response that initiated the recall and close collaboration with the US Food and Drug Administration and veterinarians to identify the cause. ¹ The media can play both positive and negative roles in such an event: the heightened media attention helped the company communicate quickly and efficiently, and it also created a pressure that pushed researchers toward fast and false assumptions. ¹

The response should focus on the facts and on the issue, and the story can be built from there. ^{9, 10} Apologies go a long way, especially in the United States. ¹⁰ There, people tend to be more emotion-based than fact-based in such situations, so a sincere apology for actions taken or not taken, together with care shown for the people involved and how they are affected, can be powerful. ¹⁰

At a university hospital, a healthy three-year-old boy attending for a growth hormone deficiency test received more than ten times the required dose of arginine after a series of mistakes that included the pharmacy delivering two bottles instead of one and a nurse injecting the contents of both, and he died the next day of a brain oedema related to the overdose. ¹ The family's privacy complicated the public relations response; when the family agreed to a press conference two weeks after the death, the clinic's medical director apologised to them and set out the measures taken to prevent a recurrence, including a new medication committee and a change to the medical school curriculum. ¹

An organisation should have one spokesperson, perhaps two, because although the message should be consistent, everyone needs to sleep. ¹⁰ The spokespeople should be up to date on key messages and have extensive media training. ¹⁰ People forget that other employees might get questions too, and everyone in the organisation should be prepared for questions from friends, a media ambush on the way home or to the car, or simply an unexpected phone call. ¹⁰

Tenets of crisis communication

The two main rules of good crisis communication are to have a plan, and to tell the truth and tell it fast. ¹

One account of crisis communication sets out ten tenets: ¹¹

1. Whenever possible, keep it simple.
2. Often, the biggest hurdle to overcome is the organisation's own staff, specifically the legal team.
3. Always dig deep and find the story behind the story.
4. Don't lie, and focus on the facts.
5. Don't become defensive or angry, but be willing to apologise and be humble.
6. Don't blame or point fingers, but do address the company's own actions: it can speak only for its own organisation, not for anyone else involved.
7. Don't let everyone talk about the issue, but make sure there is one spokesperson.
8. Don't ignore the issue, but act swiftly and communicate, when appropriate.
9. Care.
10. Sometimes the best response is to say nothing at all.

^{11, 5, 9, 10}