Seven Critical Areas to Consider Before Crafting a Crisis Communications Plan

Fires, stealing, sexual harassment, terrorist attacks, flooding, fraud, product failure, tornadoes, murder, suicide, lawsuits, product tainting, kidnapping, extortion, embezzlement, negligence. Need I go on?

When building a list of the number of ways that your company, organization or client can be stuck by disaster, you are only limited by your imagination. Unfortunately, I have found that it is NEVER a question of IF disaster will strike, the question is when. And if you find yourself in the midst of a disaster, chances are you have just entered Crisis Communications mode.

Hence, after being called in three times in the past 12 months to help companies in the midst of some form of Crisis Communications Scenario, I felt it was time to put into writing some initial thoughts on preparing a Crisis Communications Plan.

Outlined below then are what I believe to be the seven critical areas to consider before crafting a Crisis Communications Plan.

1.  Consider your company/organization 

If your organization is publicly traded, meaning its shares are traded in a stock market, then this should flavor everything within your Crisis Communications Plan. Similarly, if you sell or market products or services that are regulated by a governmental agency, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Communications Commission, then such facts need to be taken into account as well when crafting a Crisis Communications program.

2.  Consider your product/service

What are the main products or services that you make, sell and/or market? Now think of as many ways as possible that your product/service could break, fail, harm others, etc. Conversely, think of the different ways your employees, organization or manufacturing partner(s) could fail to properly make or deliver your products/services. Not fun, huh? Unfortunately, these are exactly some of the questions that need to be considered before beginning to create a Crisis Communications plan.

3.  Consider your people

In item No. 2 above, I asked you to consider how colleagues inside your organization might contribute to a disaster by failing to make or deliver your products and/or services. Now try to consider all the other ways your fellow employees might create problems for your company. Within the last several months, I can recall news reports about employees and/or executives getting killed, injured, committing suicide, shooting other employees, committing fraud, being arrested, dying, lying, committing terrorist acts, making mistakes . . . my mental list goes on and on.

This area can give people headaches trying to anticipate all of the ways an employee or executive can consciously or unintentionally hurt an organization. For this reason, I recommend companies categorize such possibilities into four sub-sections and then consider how these might be applied to your firm:

• Legal — (their actions bring potential harm to the firm)
• Health — (an injury or illness strikes one or more employee or executive)
• Acts of God — (floods, fires, storms, earthquakes, etc.)
• Actions of others — (another person purposefully or unintentionally harms one or more employee or executive)

4.  Consider outsiders

As suggested in item No. 3 above, people outside of your organization might harm someone working for your firm. In this regard, I am not limiting this to physical harm, but also include legal matters, emotional/psychological harm, etc. In addition, one should contemplate other likely areas of vulnerability to ways that people outside of your company might hurt your organization. For example,

• How likely is it that your firm might be sued?
• Are other people/organizations opposed to your products/services?
• Could these people/organizations protest against your company or attack it or your people?
• Could your computers and/or Website(s) be attacked by hackers?

Each of these points (and more) need to be considered before beginning to write a Crisis Communications program.

5.  Consider acts of God

What happens if your company has a fire? Or a ship carrying your products sinks while crossing the Pacific Ocean? Or you lose power to your building? Or your building is struck by lightning? Or you have to evacuate your facilities because a gasoline truck blew a tire while navigating your street, tipped over and spilled 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel? I think you get the point.

6.  Consider your unique circumstances

Unique circumstances? What does that mean? For example, when I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I remember hearing about a small plane missing an airport runway and landing on the roof of a nearby mall. (True story.)

So . . . is your company located near an airport? Take that into consideration. Are you located near a highway, river, in an earthquake zone, on the beach, in an area prone to tornadoes or hurricanes, in a crime-ridden area?

Or . . . do you manufacture dangerous products, like explosives? Or is your company involved in a dangerous industry, like mining, oil/gas exploration or deepsea fishing? Such information should permeate every part of a Crisis Communications plan.

7.  Consider weird stuff

And last, you need to think about weird stuff.

Before someone put poison into pain capsules, no one really thought about product tampering, but now you can’t even contemplate Crisis Communications without remembering Johnson & Johnson and how it tampered Tylenol capsules almost killed the company. Similarly, since World War II, no one had seriously considered using planes as piloted missiles, except for the Osama bin Laden-inspired plotters who led the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.

I recognize that this item is probably the hardest one to approach since I’m suggesting you should think of the unthinkable, the unknowable, the out-of-the-ordinary.

As a result, I recommend asking yourself the following question, “What other wacky, crazy or unexpected thing could happen to hurt my company/organization?”

Mull this question around in your head for a bit and I suspect you’ll come up with some new ideas, some of which will be worthy of consideration when you begin crafting your Crisis Communications plan.

Summary

Every communications professional should have a Crisis Communications plan at the ready because disaster (in one form or another) is going to hit your firm or organization; it’s not a question of if — it’s a question of when.

That being the case, I firmly believe savvy pros should contemplate the following five areas before beginning to compose a Crisis Communications program:

1. Consider your company/organization,
2. Consider your product/service,
3. Consider your people,
4. Consider outsiders,
5. Consider acts of God,
6. Consider your unique circumstances, and
7. Consider weird stuff.

Communications executives and managers who consider such areas in advance, will end up with a comprehensive Crisis Communications program ready to tackle virtually any potential disaster before it strikes – because disaster will strike.