What’s behind your crisis comms plan?

Unless you’re a brand new business, chances are that you’ve experienced at least one crisis in your working life *cough* pandemic *cough*. Whether you’re a public sector organisation that’s a dab hand at providing crowd control communications, or you’re a private sector business that keeps a keen eye on the conversations around your products or services – you have to make sure your crisis comms plan is on point.

Don’t tell us you haven’t got a crisis comms plan?!

If you haven’t got a strategy, take our advice. Start building one today! We sound like a broken record, but fail to prepare, prepare to fail. You never know when a crisis might unfold that affects your business or your wider industry unless you have powers we haven’t yet seen. We’ll just let the stats speak for themselves on this one – PwC’s annual Global Crisis Survey is VERY telling…

Back in 2019 (which feels like a whole LIFETIME ago, right?!) 95% of survey respondents said they expected a crisis to hit within the next two years. Well, we all know what happened late in 2019 and the following two years 😂. Excellent foresight from the survey respondents 👏

That said, only 30% of respondents to the 2021 survey said they had a crisis management team in place when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and 62% of survey respondents used a crisis response plan during the pandemic. Anyway, back to the here and now 🙂

In 2019 69% of organisations had experienced some sort of disruption in the past five years, with that increasing to 96% between 2021 and 2023 🤯

76% of organisations said their most serious crisis had either a medium or high impact on their operations – highlighting that operational resilience is critical in times of crisis. Achieve this by using an integrated approach and align multiple resilience capabilities. There’s a reason animals hunt in packs 🤷

The most integrated sectors, according to the 2023 Global Crisis Survey, are:

Let’s focus on that 19%. As public sector, dealing with public services and, of course, the general public, how you deal with and recover from crises has implications for the trust levels in your communities. Organisations using an integrated approach to crisis management and communications yielded improved risk management and financial performance, competitive advantage, a protected reputation, and stakeholder trust. So let’s hope that number is a little higher next year 🤞

Without telling you what you might already know, there are some key things to include in your crisis communications plan. We’re not going to go into masses of detail here, but expect a follow up at some point soon 😉

Crisis comms can be split into two key areas: major incidents and reputation management.

For major incidents, note what action you need to take to ensure you’re prepared for a major incident and also advice on the communications activity to take place during an incident. For reputation management, your activity will be centred around communications that take place after an event that has threatened the reputation of your organisation.

Structure your crisis comms plan into three phases:

If you have a solid plan in place, when the moment comes to activate it, you’ll experience efficiency and save previous time plus everyone will be clear on what they need to do and when to reduce any confusion. You’ll also be aware of the resources you require in order to enact your plan successfully!

Make sure to include roles and responsibilities for a crisis team, different communication messages for your team members to use, and specify which channels you will use for your comms. Remember to regularly check the effectiveness of your crisis comms plan, making any changes and improvements as you see fit.

Looking at the range of responses, we personally feel the main lesson here is to be prepared for any and every eventuality, and we’re relatively confident that you would agree, right? Of course, not all of these risks will be relevant to you and your organisation, but it’s always good to have an awareness of what might or might not happen – choose your priority risks to curate your crisis comms strategy.

Unfortunately we don’t have a crystal ball – if we did we’d have won the lottery by now – so we can’t actually tell you what your next crisis is going to be. Whether you accidentally put your foot in it on socials, you experience dreaded technical issues, or your service falls short of customer expectations, it’s impossible to say.

When it comes to global crisis, there’s actually some pretty solid research out there that may give you an insight on what kinds of situations you could be planning for…

In The World Economic Forum Global Risks Perception Survey 2024, participants were asked to select up to “five risks that [they] believe[d] were most likely to present a material crisis on a global scale in 2024”.

And… (drumroll please) 🥁 here are the top five results!

Looking at the range of responses, we personally feel the main lesson here is to be prepared for any and every eventuality, and we’re relatively confident that you would agree, right? Of course, not all of these risks will be relevant to you and your organisation, but it’s always good to have an awareness of what might or might not happen – choose your priority risks to curate your crisis comms strategy.

We hope that this array of crises aren’t all waiting for you in the foreseeable future, and realistically it’s more likely to be a storm in a teacup that you come up against. But, it’s important that if, and when, something happens, you have a clear plan in place to deal with it – especially from a conversational point of view to stop the negativity and panic from spreading like wildfire. With this in mind, we’ve got a super speedy how-to on how to get your crisis comms plan kicked off…

Take a look at the history of your business and precisely define what you would class as a crisis. If you’re fresh out of the gates, consider looking at competitors and try to flag what could go wrong, and the factors that have influenced them in the past.

Create a document with your company values and the positive key messages that define your business and set you apart from the crowd. Better yet, make sure the document is in a central location so the relevant employees can find it exactly when they need to. Make sure it’s clear and easy to follow, just so you’re not having to deal with another host of issues. 😉

Based on your values, work out when and where you can push your positive messages in order to deflect the negativity that comes with crisis. Set clear rules on your ideal method of reacting to negative communications, the degree of public acknowledgement you want to convey, and which stakeholders are key for approval and awareness if the situation should call for reaction.

Set up a system whereby you’re constantly monitoring the noise around your brand, selecting tools and accountability for different aspects of your products or service, and a straightforward communication system to bring the crisis to stakeholder attention ASAP.

It’s important to note that one of the key stages of creating a crisis comms plan is to listen to the noise surrounding your brand, products and/or services. But how exactly can you do that? The internet is a BIG place, right?

The answer, unfortunately, is yes. But there are tools and techniques that you can use that can help you listen to the noise. Take Orlo Insights for instance, which allows you to listen to conversations across socials, forums, review sites (and more!), utilising advanced AI to analyse and break down the messages by sentiment, emotion, and theme.

Even with access to the chatter around your brand, to really identify a crisis you need to understand it and, more importantly, you need to get it to key stakeholders quickly and efficiently to take appropriate action before it’s too late.