Crisis Communications or Miracle-Making

We get a lot of calls these days asking if we know crisis communications.  We absolutely do, but ‘crisis’ is relative.  A crisis can mean a negative article written by a blogger, company lay-offs, a lawsuit gone bad, a city plagued with Swine Flu or SARS, or global crises like natural disasters and war.

No matter how big or small we may judge the crisis to be, the clients living it feel like they’ve been hit by a bus and nothing less than a miracle is required.

So, how does one make a miracle happen?  Here are the 10 commandments:

1)      Use the wisdom of discernment and restraint.  Know when you need to respond and when to not feed a negative story.

2)      Be a compassionate listener.  You know what the crisis means to you, but what does it mean to others?  How many audiences are impacted?  What is at stake for them?  Lawyers are helpful at protecting your interests, but do what you can to show compassion to others who are also feeling the crisis.

3)      Take responsibility.  If you have a role in this crisis, own up to it.  Anything less is insulting to your audiences and voids any compassionate listening you may have done.  It’s also the only way to have credibility when you try to claim later that it won’t happen again.  You must understand what went wrong to fix it and to avert it in the future.

4)      Make a plan.  Some miracles appear out of the sky, but usually there’s an act that precedes them.  First, have a crisis communications plan in place before a crisis hits.  Once a crisis hits, define the problem.  Look at the details.  Designate who are your spokespeople and stick to it.  Let everyone know what to do or what not to do.  Be clear and specific with your teams.

5)      Communicate often.  Silence breeds fear and speculation, so communicate clearly and communicate often.  Don’t forget to communicate to your employees and internal audiences as well as external audiences.

6)      How many times do I have to say I’m sorry?  Just the once will do, but mean it.

7)      When you think you’ve done enough, go one step further.  Do the extraordinary.  For example, Odwalla executives didn’t just apologize when a few customers got sick from their juice.  They paid hospital bills without a lawsuit.   They visited customers in the hospital.  Their efforts to reach out and be compassionate were extraordinary enough to win over the public and even the customers who were harmed.

8)      Make restitution.  If you can repair the damage, do it.

9)      Demonstrate real change.  Once the immediate crisis is under control, demonstrate that you’ve made tangible changes to avoid it in the future.

10)   Restore faith.  Don’t make any promises that you can’t keep, and keep the promises you make.

There will come a time when it’s time to assess the lessons learned during the crisis, adopt them to a revised crisis communications plan and then move forward with new resolve.  Don’t be afraid to know when to cut the crisis off and move on.  If you’ve done this process correctly, there is a great possibility that you will be better off than you were before the crisis happened.  And that, my friends, is a miracle.

If you have questions about managing a crisis, please feel free to contact one of our offices about our crisis communications services.