Why do you need a crisis communication plan?

Just ask Vanaik Furniture and Mattress Store in Toronto.

Yikes.

I’m quite sure that the owners/workers of Vanaik Furniture and Mattress store are not racist. Just like I’m fairly sure that the owners/workers of Cosmos Furniture aren’t racist. In fact, I believe the last thing any of these companies, including the Chinese company that made the sofa, wanted to do was to offend anyone. It was a simple oversight.

Question time: Would you have checked the label?

Now look around your business and ask yourself if there’s anything or anyone you’re not 100% positive won’t put your business into crisis mode.

Are you sure?

Look, it’s impossible to account for every disaster that might befall a company, and trying to prevent everything will drive you insane. But a good crisis communication plan can save you and your business when the unthinkable happens.

Here are a few things to take into account regarding a crisis communications plan.

Make sure you protect your employees and customers:

Whenever a crisis hits, the first thing that needs to happen is to make sure your employees and customers are out of harm’s way. A crisis is bad, compounding it by not helping the people that control your livelihood is disastrous. Keep them informed as well. These people deserve to know what’s going on, and it helps keep an inaccurate version of events from coming out later.

Make sure the plan can be followed by anyone:

You never know who’s going to have to deal with the crisis. It may be a secretary, or an intern, or the CEO who’s going to have to take charge. Make sure they have detailed instructions written down and accessible. Make sure everyone knows the location of the plan.

Be transparent, honest, and available:

When I was a reporter, an honest account of a story would get me one day’s worth of news. Finding out I was lied to, or not told the whole truth, gave me a week’s worth of news including an investigative story. Be honest! Reporters aren’t expecting total access, but they want to be treated fairly. If you don’t have the information they’re looking for, tell them you don’t know but you’ll find out. Then get back to them. Reporters work on odd schedules, so expect calls at odd times. Be friendly, and if you can’t talk with them right then, get back to them as soon as you can.

One message, one messenger:

If you have too many people talking to the media, your gonna have inconsistencies. Inconsistencies lead to questions of lying. You don’t want that. Appoint one person to be the press contact and make sure the message is the same one you gave to your customers and employees.

Take responsibility:

If your business was the cause the crisis. Be honest about it. You’ll have to deal with the fallout either way, but owning up to a mistake will help you in the long run. And make sure you fix the problem.  The last thing you want is to have another crisis caused by an issue you knew about previously and didn’t address.

If you don’t have a crisis communications plan, you need one. As Vanaik Furniture and Mattress Store found out, a crisis can come from anywhere. Talk to a public relations professional. They can help you put a plan together, and some, like us here at the PRAS Group, can come to your business to help you if you ever need to put the plan into action.

We hope you never have to go through a crisis, but having a crisis communications plan could make the difference between you keeping your business or looking for work somewhere else.