Crisis Communication: Preparation and Response Guide

Case study: A store fire

Co-op is one of the UK’s largest food retailers.

When a fire broke out at a Co-op store in Wales, the team was alerted at 2:15pm local time, immediately after this tweet was sent.

“@dailypostwales just seen that the @coopukfood in Pensarn, Abergele is on fire.” — @alanjones2004

This enabled the Co-op Digital Engagement team to act quickly, and they were able to get the situation under control within an hour.

3. Create an emergency communications team

You need to appoint a small team of senior team members to take charge on crisis communications. Make sure to pick a representative sample of each department in your company. This group will be responsible for making key decisions during times of crisis and will be in charge of regularly meeting to review and update the comms plan.

4. Develop holding statements

A key responsibility for your emergency communications team will be creating holding statements. You can’t predict exactly what crisis will arise but you can develop communications to be used for a wide variety of scenarios. Having these prepared statements on hand will allow you to respond to your audience faster when a problem does arise.

5. Review regularly

This process is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Crisis or no crisis, these steps need to be reviewed regularly and updated accordingly. Your approach to crisis communication will naturally evolve as your business does.

Part 2: Immediate action

A crisis has hit. Your mentions are blowing up. Your sales people are getting concerned calls from clients. Something needs to be done.

As a member of the comms team, you’re front and center.

Take a breath. Now, think. What steps do you have in place for moments like this?

1. Assess the crisis situation

You need to be quick to respond to a crisis. However, you can’t react too quickly.

You need to wait until you (and your team) have all of the relevant information at hand.

Start by calling your crisis team together. Give them a debrief of what you know and then discuss what response would be most appropriate.

Before you release external communications of any kind, make sure to align the entire organization with the right information. Leverage a marketing reporting and command center for these instances. They allow you to both receive external feedback in real time and to share crucial comms across your organization immediately, ensuring you will be the single source of truth for your team.

Side Bar: When you’ve already conducted the steps in part one, you can move fairly quickly. When you haven’t, you have to go through each of those steps before making a move. Preparation saves a whole lot of critical time.

2. Identify key messages

If you have your holding statements prepped, it’s time to take them out and decide what key messages need to be added in or taken out.

Your emergency communications team already knows what type of information its stakeholders are looking for. So what should those stakeholders know about this crisis? And what does your audience need?

Keep it simple – have no more than three main messages and communicate them clearly.

3. Communicate early and often (in your brand voice)

You have the information you need, you know your key messages. Now it’s time to start talking. We’ve all experienced the frustration of an app crashing or a company going silent amidst a scandal. Sometimes, just knowing someone is doing something is enough to quiet fears (as long as that action sounds sensible and proportionate to the seriousness of the problem).

Start the conversation by introducing the problem, the current status, and the proposed solution. It can be useful to commit to regular updates – this sets deadlines for your team and provides comfort for your audience.

Remember to always gut-check your communications against your company voice. Just because a crisis is at hand doesn’t mean you have to sanitize the personality of your brand. Keep the information at the front but don’t turn into someone you’re not.