PR Crisis Management: How to Handle a PR Crisis

Understanding PR Crisis Management

PR Crisis management is the effective handling of any ‘event’ that could negatively impact the reputation of your brand in the public eye.

It’s a strategic approach that’s success lies in detailed planning and careful execution. A ‘crisis’ not effectively managed by a brand, can leave long-lasting damage to relationships with key stakeholders, diminish customer loyalty and undo trust built up over years – sometimes, overnight. 

A good crisis management plan will influence the narrative around a crisis event and whether through direct communication, social media or the media, it will ensure the message your business needs to deliver, is delivered and the damage to your brand is mitigated. 

It’s not an overstatement to say that a crisis almost always has a very real impact on a company’s bottom line if a plan isn’t followed.

Common Causes of PR Crises

A crisis can happen to an organisation at any time.

Its origin may come from internal or external factors and no business can predict every single event, but the key to crisis management in PR is being well prepared for any potential happening.

There are typical types of crises that are more common than others and happen more frequently. These are often related to a poor customer experience, a HR issue, unethical or even criminal activity taking place. It could be related to non-inclusive or ill-thought out comms, a sensitive data leak or cyber security lapse, a business breaking compliance, corporate law or industry rules that it should abide by. The list goes on.

The important thing to remember is all crises are serious when it comes to protecting your brand and your business. 

It’s often not until a brand’s reputation is damaged, that you realise its true value.

Steps to create a PR Crisis Management Plan

Your organisation’s handling of a crisis is as much under the spotlight as the event itself. A good plan will minimise negative fallout and reassure stakeholders you’re in control. 

Structure and organisation are the two most important elements of PR Crisis management. Your business needs to have the right mechanisms in place to efficiently and effectively handle a crisis from the moment it begins, right through to managing the aftermath. 

To help, we have detailed below some of the key considerations to make when putting a crisis management plan in place. 

Identify the core risks to your organisation. One of the first actions your PR or comms team should take when putting a PR crisis management plan together is identifying those events that are most likely to impact your organisation. 

We have already referenced some of the most common types of crisis, but every organisation is unique and their risks vary. For a school this might be negative Ofsted reports, safeguarding challenges or an illness breakout among staff and pupils. For a software as a service business it’s more likely to be service outages, data breaches or price increases. Taking shopping centres, the more common risks could include police related incidents like shoplifting, it could be power outages, flooding and incidents that impact accessibility and prove an inconvenience or safety risk to shoppers.

Every team working on a crisis management plan needs to be open minded and consider a wide range of possibilities, if the answer to the question is, “yes this could damage our reputation” then it should be on your list of risks.

Create a clear crisis comms process and set of responsibilities. Even if you’ve identified your core list of common risks to the business, where crisis management often falls down is when there isn’t a clear process in place to handle events. 

While each event is different and will require input from those involved or different leaders within the organisation, the most important thing is having designated people in place who lead the PR response no matter the crisis. You should have at least two comms people who are elected to lead a crisis event, whether from inside the business or from your PR agency, in case one can’t be involved due to absence. 

To support those leading, in our experience it’s also important to develop a clear set of responsibilities and lines of communication so that those who need to take action are given every opportunity to. 

A clear crisis comms process needs to be  outlined and briefed to all key stakeholders within the business or organisation – so that as soon as a crisis event occurs, the right people are alerted. 

One example of how this works is an education provider Tank worked with. 

We set up a clear process that was briefed from the senior leadership team right down to front line staff – everyone in this chain knew that as soon as a crisis event occurred, they had to use a designated number and email address, which only the nominated leads received. This then gave the PR leads the ability to take action swiftly and involve who was needed, giving them that advantage to effectively manage the crisis event from its start. 

This process ensured a quick response to events and removed many delays that could have impacted the success of the crisis management plan.

Develop a bank of crisis statements and comms. Every crisis comes with time pressure. 

If it’s origin is a social media post, references to it or comments on it could be increasing by the second. If the media has gotten hold of a negative story about your business, they should offer you the right to reply, but typically they will only give you a matter of hours to formulate a response.

Finding ways to save time while effectively handling PR crisis management can help alleviate some of the pressure. One way we recommend doing this is by putting together a bank of template statements linked to those core risks. These will serve as a starting point for when a crisis arises and allow your designated crisis comms team to confirm the correct details and narrative and then quickly update these to use in direct communication, for social media and for the media. 

It’s worth mentioning again that these templates should only be used as a starting point and it is not good practice to continually use the same wording. This is because it can quickly be perceived as disingenuous and create further negative fallout, which is exactly what a good PR crisis management plan should avoid. 

Crisis statements should nearly always follow the three Rs of good crisis comms: Regret; Recompense and Reform. 

Monitor opinion. In the crisis event aftermath, your business should monitor opinion and reaction. 

The best way to do this is to have monitoring tools in place, which allow you to review sentiment and perception. This should include:

Media monitoring: This will pick up any news outlets covering the story. You may be well aware of journalists who plan to cover the story as they will have contacted your team for a response, but as with some major crisis events we see in the news week-to-week, a story can snowball and staying on top of where its covered is near impossible without media monitoring in place.

Social media listening: This tool allows your team to collate an overview of social media posts that mention your brand or key terms related to the crisis event. This will give you a more direct route to understanding what damage it has done to your brand and how it altered public opinion. This monitoring should begin as soon as a crisis event has been flagged. 

Customer opinion tracking: Some organisations will regularly share customer polls for feedback on products, services and brand perception and awareness. We do not recommend your next opinion poll goes out until at least three to six months after a crisis event, allowing the impact to abate. 

Your first poll after a crisis will offer valuable insight on its long-term effect and will help you gather intelligence that can inform your recovery plan. 

Review and improve: Even if your crisis comms plan is working well, it’s always good practice to review it. We recommend the review takes place at least every six months. This is because new industry legislation, changes in the law, technological advancements and cultural events can take place that impact the types of crisis that may arise.

Allowing your plan to age without intervention will impact its effectiveness over time. Your designated comms team who form part of your PR crisis management plan should lead on this and ensure regular reviews are taking place. 

Developing a recovery plan

The final step of a strong PR Crisis Management plan is ensuring a recovery plan is put in place following the crisis.

If the event has damaged your brand’s credibility or created a negative perception around it, it’s important to develop a recovery plan that looks to rebuild the strength of your reputation. Depending on the severity of the crisis, this will influence how long a plan will need to be in place for.

This should be implemented operationally first to resolve the issue at hand and the PR plan should follow to ensure wording with meaningful action is communicated to all stakeholders.

Important things to remember during a crisis

For all those involved in creating and executing a crisis management plan, in our experience,  there are a few important things to remember that may help with ensuring its effectiveness;

• Every event needs to be treated with the same level of seriousness and care until the business deems it a closed case. You may find many crises don’t make their way into the public eye, but this doesn’t diminish the importance of being well prepared and that might be the difference between the public being aware or not. 

• Communications in response to a crisis should always be as concise as they can be and avoid unnecessary details that could fuel the story further. Think back to those three Rs. 

• Staying calm is a must in a crisis. Working under high pressure isn’t everyone’s strength so make sure you have the right personalities in place to lead. 

• Make sure all details are clearly gathered and recorded internally. You won’t need to communicate all these externally but it’s vital that the PR team knows all the details for context and that key learnings can be made by the business on what’s happened. 

• Ensure robust systems and communication is used to ensure details are kept secure. 

• When someone leaves the business who needs to be involved in the crisis comms process, make sure their replacement is briefed and brought into the loop or the process will break down during the next event.