Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Creating A Crisis Communications Plan

By Jerri Perry


There are times wherein a corporation would undergo a certain situation wherein their whole name could be spoiled. Scandals, rumors, and other types of bad situations involving the corporation could really destroy the sales of the corporation which is why when these things happen, they have to react quickly. The best thing for management to do in this situation would be to come up with a crisis communications plan.

Now the first part of this process would be to simply think of a medium that is most appropriate to address this type of situation. Now this could be any type of channel like the world wide web, the mass media, the press, or just the close networks. Now the goal here is to be able to make the message spread far and wide so the target audience will hear it.

Now the very first part of the plan that will be made would be an overview of the crisis and what exactly happened. Now the first part has to be a report of the exact happenings of the situation and of course the chain of events that actually influenced the situation. So basically, one will have to put some of the signals and warnings that the corporation saw.

Now the second part of this thing would be a list of some people that were included in the entire thing. Most likely, the communications team and the public relations team would make an appearance in this part because they are the front liners of this situation. Now other people who will play a big role in this situation are the media contacts.

Now the next part is a complete and detailed assessment of how the corporation was able to address the situation. Of course they should also list down the names of people who were actually included in the situation and what their roles were in detail. Of course many would prefer to use an action matrix in order to illustrate their actions.

Of course the next thing to do is create the message that will be shot to the target audience. The first thing to do would be to include a lot of facts that are relevant to the situation as well as some key words that the corporation would want to point out. Now a lot of corporations would actually make use of the five step model for message preparation to help them.

Now the last part would be to now come up with the details on how exactly the management would want to present the message. Now when a corporation would want to target a specific audience, then they should show a list of people that are in that audience. From there, the media contacts, press contacts, and of course some third party contacts would be listed in this part and how they are going to be used to blast the message.

So as one can see, it is actually fairly simple to create a crisis communications plan. One of the things never to forget is that this kind of situation has to be fixed in a week or less. If it goes beyond a week, then the bad image may stay.




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