Crisis and Management

Every little thing counts in a crisis. Jawaharlal Nehru 1889-1964, Indian Prime Minister

Typically, a ‘crisis’ involves chaos and confusion, and misrepresentation of facts and figures. Of course, today I’m referring to the communication on many levels in an organization. The hard fact is you never know with who and how you may have to interact. Do you have a plan that prepares you for any eventuality?

Experts list seven must-have elements in every crisis communications kit. The odds are incredibly high that your company will experience a crisis of some kind in the next five years. A vital factor whether that crisis builds or seriously damages your company is how you handle that crisis with the media.

It will help to bear in mind that this crisis may allow you to continue business as normal, or it may end up as a situation where you’ll not be able to access the tools you normally use to do your job (natural disaster, union strikes, etc.). To cope with this, your crisis communications kit must be flexible enough to provide the appearance of normality even in the most abnormal situations.

Thus it’s important for your crisis communications kit to not only be duplicated in some offsite location, but to also include information, disks, graphics, computer files, photos, etc. that are normally readily at your fingertips in your office.

Consider this starter list of six items that should be included in any crisis communications kit:

1. A list of the members of the crisis management team, which should include, a trusted assistant/top manager from the CEO’s office, heads of each department, public relations, marketing and security team members. In case of actual crisis, this team will be focused down to the group applicable to that specific crisis.

2. Complete contact information for key officers, spokespeople, and crisis management team members including company and personal phone numbers, email addresses, cell numbers, pagers, faxes, instant message handles, addresses, even spouse’s cell numbers.

3. Fact sheets on the company, each division, each physical location, and each product offered, preferably in camera-ready condition.

4. Copies of your company, division and product logos, your press release format and the scanned in signature of your CEO on disk.

5. Pre-written scripts answering key questions that you have generated through your crisis scenario analysis. What words will you use to the typical “We don’t have that information yet, but will let you know as soon as it becomes available.”

6. Contact information for each of your key media contacts both locally, nationally, and if appropriate, important financial press and analysts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 6:18 am and is filed under Corporate, Emergencies, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.