8 Ways to Shield Your Organization and Executives from A PR Crisis 

By Jennifer R. Farmer and Chris Pugh

 

In today’s 24/7 news cycle, a single misstep can quickly escalate into a public relations nightmare. It could hurt your reputation and erode the trust of your clients, donors, and community. Here are eight essential tips to help you prepare, prevent, or manage critical issues before they escalate.  

Often, before an issue escalates out of control, there are warning signs that an issue must be addressed. The best way to manage a crisis is to prevent it before it arises. Practice deep listening with clients, partners, donors, and the public. Once you listen, act. This will avert many challenges.  

A crisis response plan is an outline of how your organization would operate in a pressure. Developing a crisis response plan when things are relatively calm is time well spent. The response plan includes a host of emergency situations and the protocol for managing such scenarios. It also has key contacts from within your organization and outside your organization. In a digital world, it is so easy to rely on smart devices and to store all important information there. But if your system were to crash, would you know how to quickly contact your team, partners, funders, and government officials? If not, it’s time to develop a comprehensive crisis response plan. This will boost your and your team’s confidence and adaptability. The plan can include:  

 

Do you have a clear internal line of communication? This is beneficial for business operations, but it is especially valuable when important issues arise. A clear line of communication could include the organization’s leadership team or a crisis communications team. It would include key organizational spokespeople as well as persons at all levels of the organization.  Need some help developing a communications strategy? We offer consultations to help groups plan their strategy.

 

It’s helpful to understand what’s being about your leader and organization online. Social media, media tracking tools, and Google Alerts are helpful media monitoring tools. Monitoring your digital footprint and exposure will help you identify issues that must be quickly addressed. It will also give you a sense of public sentiment. 

 

Cultivate relationships with journalists, influencers, and bloggers long before you need the relationship. Should a crisis arise, you want to have people who trust you who will give you a platform to communicate with your audience. Waiting until a crisis to develop such relationships may be too late.  

One of the ways you can do this is by inviting reporters to lunch, coffee or virtual meetups. You can also periodically share positive stories, achievements and reporters with pre-selected journalists. When journalists know you, they are less likely to believe a lie about you or will at least call you to gain your input.  

 

When your organization is consistently known for doing good, a single negative incident is less likely to define you. Regularly showcase the positive impact of your work, share success stories, and highlight the good that your organization brings to the community. This ongoing positive narrative can help balance negative stories and reinforce the public’s trust in your organization. However, if you are not securing consistent media coverage, schedule a consultation so that we can help you get on the radar of the media.

 

Regardless of your media exposure, media training is a proactive strategy to support your organizational leaders and brand. There are a host of different types of media training, including message development, message delivery, communicating under pressure, practice sessions, etc.  As you think about the type of leader you are, be honest about your strengths and weaknesses. If you struggle to offer succinct and impactful responses, consider a media training focused on strengthening that weakness. If you struggle with remote interviews, arrange a media training to help you with that issue. The bottom line is media training should be catered to you and your organization.

 

The best leaders participate in on-going media training and prep. Media training allows space to think about how you communicate, how your message is received and whether you are having the intended affect on reporters and their audience. Media training also boosts confidence, allowing you and your colleagues to remain calm, even under stressful situations. 

 

The goal in all of this is to be better tomorrow than you are today. For this reason, it’s helpful to review how your organization managed various crisis situations. You don’t have to wait for a major crisis, to review what worked and what didn’t.  

 

Be proactive about soliciting feedback from your team, partners and allies on how your organization managed a crisis or challenging situation. The key here is to get feedback from a host of people at different levels of the organization. You can also review media coverage to learn how the issue was covered and whether there was anything you could have done to boost positive and fair coverage. Taking the time to solicit and process feedback will support you today and over the long term.

 

We’ve shared a lot but rest assured Spotlight PR can help you. You do not need to navigate a crisis alone. Our team is trained to support you with every idea we’ve outlined in this article. Contact us at press@spotlightpr.org or book a consultation on our website.