The story is all over the cable news and headlines dominate the front pages. A gaggle of media reporters is waiting for a comment from your chief executive.

» Download a printable version of this article on how to handle the media and prepare for a communications crisis.

A Crisis Plan Can Prevent a Bad Situation from Getting Worse

A crisis may be impossible to avoid, but proper preparation can help prevent a bad situation from getting worse. Unattended or improperly handled, a crisis can threaten the organization’s credibility, reputation, and in its most extreme form—its survival or, at a minimum, the survival of its leadership.

By withholding information or covering up the truth, a company can ruin its reputation forever.

Define a ‘Crisis’

A crisis is any event – accidental or intended – that has or could have an adverse effect on an organization’s reputation and business.

• Incidents including serious injury, death and/or property damage
• Labor relations issues
• Major weather-related problems
• Allegations of mismanagement
• Abrupt change in leadership
• Allegation of employee misconduct
• Workplace violence
• Acts of terrorism
• Potential financial crisis

Any crisis may quickly escalate if improperly managed.

Put Someone in Charge

Crisis planning is a dynamic process that requires frequent revisiting, rewriting and retraining. In many organizations the public relations, communications or legal departments may be in charge. Often, an outside consulting firm is used for assistance.

Ensure that one person is in charge of keeping the plan up-to-date.

Set Goals for Handling the Crisis

Before beginning your crisis preparation, clarify your organization’s goals. They should include protecting employees and their families, serving the public and/or your customers or key stakeholders; safeguarding your financial and capital assets; and protecting your investors.

Plan…Team…Training

Preparing for a crisis is a complex and time-consuming process. Essential elements include writing and maintaining a Plan Document; creating a Crisis Response Team; and training key personnel.

Make a Plan

The crisis communications plan is just as important as the project’s blueprint. The crisis plan outlines procedures that will secure the welfare and safety of the public and workers.

Elements of a crisis communications plan include:

• Statement of policy regarding crisis communications
• Procedures and telephone numbers for contacting police, fire and EMT personnel
• Monitoring and record-keeping system
• Corporate communications coordination
• Spokesperson guidelines
• Sample questions that may be asked by reporters
• Procedures for contacting employees and their families
• Contact information for the Crisis Response Team and other key executives, including mobile phone and e-mail addresses – be sure to include after-hours and “private” contact information

Form a Crisis Response Team

The Response Team is the group that will actually manage the crisis as it unfolds, often consisting of staff from several departments:

• Executive office
• Public Relations
• Legal
• Operations

In many cases, it’s best to split the team: An “onsite group” will travel to the site of the incident immediately. A “home group” should convene in the office or another location away from the site of the incident.

Arrange (ahead of time, of course) for a conference call facility to allow the two teams to exchange information.

It’s essential to have back-ups for all Crisis Team members, in case the main team members are not available.

Train Your People

Few people were born with the ability to improvise concise statements in front of a TV camera. Several people in your organization should be trained to make official statements in the event of a crisis.

Outside consultants usually are brought in for media training. They will typically show videotape examples of good or poor handling of a crisis, discuss how to create talking points on the fly and practice speaking in front of the camera. Scenarios that depict possible crisis situations are often used for practice.

Make Connections

Crisis Team members should be equipped with the best communications technology available. They will need access to your organization’s media contact list, templates for creating and issuing press releases, up-to-date background information on the organization and an ability to make updates to your Web site from the field.

PDAs, notebook computers with wireless Internet access and fully charged cell phones are critical tools.

News Media: Partner, Not Enemy

Too often, it’s the CEO vs. the media in a kind of battle that doesn’t end well for anybody.

The media are just doing their jobs, keeping the public informed. When you need to ask for public cooperation in responding to the crisis, the media will be more helpful if you are respecting their thirst for information. Treat them as a partner, not an enemy.

The author co-founded the Message Engineers and is president of Jonathan Lehrer Communications, Inc., providing public relations and crisis communications planning to government agencies, non-profit organizations and business. Learn more at www.message-engineers.com. Louis Pukelis contributed to this article.

Let’s be clear upfront. We work with many professionals who studied for years to become civil engineers, traffic engineers or aerospace engineers. In a sense, it’s almost disrespectful to compare what we do — public relations — to the work of an engineer.

On the other hand, just as the real engineers do, we analyze, strategize, plan and build. As a real engineer might build a highway or a hotel, the Message Engineers team builds communications campaigns. Our work is centered on a message that was crafted with a specific goal in mind, just as that highway or hotel was built to meet a need or serve a segment of the community.

The selection of our name is a perfect example of what a message engineer does.

Our goal as a public relations firm is to demonstrate the value of building solid public relations programs based on analysis and planning. Plus, we wanted to capitalize on our extensive work on large highway construction projects as we also serve government, non-profit and corporate clients in other fields.

Our ability to translate “engineer speak” into plain English is helpful when working with any type of project where technical jargon or complicated rationale must be made accessible to the general public.

The Message Engineer moniker was born.

Crafting a Message to Achieve a Goal

How does this work in practice?

IDOT’s Dan Ryan and Kingery Reconstruction Projects

As public relations subcontractors to the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Message Engineers understood at the beginning that reconstruction of the Dan Ryan and Kingery expressways couldn’t happen unless a huge amount of traffic diverted off the highway. And since it was impractical to send large trucks up and down neighborhood streets, we crafted a simple campaign slogan:

Cars OFF, Trucks On 

The four-word message has proved easy for IDOT spokespeople to use in their media interviews. More important, the campaign effectively achieved significant reductions in traffic as the construction phase got underway. As we prepared printed newsletters, enewsletters, community traffic alerts and media advisories, the “Cars OFF, Trucks On” theme was everpresent.

The Will County Center for Economic Development

Another Message Engineers client benefitted from the message engineering approach.

The Will County (Ill.) Center for Economic Development has been making great strides in attracting businesses from all over the world, transforming the county into a global transportation center. But the local road network can’t handle the volume of trucks traveling in and out of the many distribution centers in the area.

The Message Engineers suggested creation of a Will County Transportation Blueprint. All of the projects in the Blueprint had been under discussion for years, but by placing them all in one document, we were able to focus community and political attention squarely on the need for a county gas tax to fund transportation improvements.

The underlying message of the word “Blueprint” conveyed a sense of deliberate planning that would lay a solid foundation for future development.

In just a few short months, the Blueprint was getting front-page coverage in the local newspaper, culminating in critical action by the County Board.

Finding the Right Message

In this complicated media world, you are bombarded with messages, from the spam in your inbox, to the”crawl” on the bottom of your TV screen, to the banner ads all over your favorite Web site.

The Message Engineers help the client cut through the clutter. In creative brainstorming sessions, hands-on media training seminars or clever copywriting for a brochure, we stay tuned to the client objective. Just like the guys with engineering degrees, we design a message that meets the goal, build a solid foundation and execute a plan.

The Message Engineers provide public relations and crisis communications planning to government agencies, non-profit organizations and business.

Facebook and YouTube should be an integral part of your marketing-communications plan.

By Jonathan Lehrer

It’s easy to set up free accounts with the popular template-based online tools. But it takes seasoned pros to integrate them into a well-planned public relations program. We can help.

Constant Contact

You can’t tune in to your local all-news radio station without hearing an ad for Constant
Contact. According to its Web site, 185,000 small businesses use Constant Contact to connect with their customers. Setting up an account is free and dozens of templates are offered at no extra charge; you can have your first email newsletter out on the Internet in a few minutes.

Or can you?

The fact is, to use Constant Contact effectively for email marketing, you need to know your way around a sophisticated content management system. What’s more, only the most basic approaches can get by without modifying the supplied templates.

You need a Constant Contact expert with a public relations background to design an effective Constant Contact experience.

Contact Jonathan Lehrer Communications / The Message Engineers for advice and help with email newsletters and tools like Constant Contact.

Survey Monkey

Let the computer do the math. That’s the basic idea behind Survey Monkey, the online survey tool. Survey Monkey can be indispensable for the public relations practitioner who needs to know what the clients’ constituents or customers think.

Type your questions into Survey Monkey’s online interface, upload your email addresses and click SEND. A few minutes later, responses will magically appear on the screen in front of you, fully tabulated and ready to be reported to your client. Easy.

Well, not so much.

It takes a seasoned public relations pro to plan the survey, write the questions and understand how to use the survey results in a comprehensive PR program. Jonathan Lehrer Communications / The Message Engineers has the technical knowledge and the public relations expertise to have your survey online and collecting data in just a few hours.

WordPress

In the “old days” (a year ago!), to update the content of your Web site required zipping an email to your paid Web consultant to make the change.

Not anymore.

Originally designed for blogs, such tools as WordPress and Typepad are being used to create Web sites that don’t look anything like a blog. These tools are free and you don’t need to be a Web designer to make them work.

But you do need a message expert to be sure the Web site says what you really want it to say. Jonathan Lehrer Communications / The Message Engineers can customize a WordPress site to deliver the right message to the right audience. Plus, after years of having clients ask how to edit their own site, we finally have an answer. We’ll show you how to use WordPress or another online content management system to keep your site fresh at virtually no cost.

YouTube

More than a hundred gazillion videos are uploaded to YouTube every nanosecond. But the vast majority of those videos aren’t properly described or tagged. Why is it sometimes impossible to find the video you want?

It’s because the person uploading the video didn’t write a keyword-rich description.

Your organization may have video footage hidden in the bottom drawer of someone’s desk. Put it to work for you on YouTube.

You could do it yourself, of course, or you could have Jonathan Lehrer Communications / The Message Engineers sort through video content that you’ve already created and post it to YouTube for maximum effect. Who knows? Maybe your CEO will become as famous as the blender guy in the labcoat.

YouTube may simply be the best and cheapest online PR tool you’ve discovered lately.

Facebook

Facebook isn’t just another Web application. It’s a completely new way to communicate.

The under-25 audience spends more time on Facebook than your parents spend watching TV. Jonathan Lehrer Communications / The Message Engineers will come to your office with a portable Internet connection and an LCD projector to demonstrate Facebook, MySpace (and why not add Wikipedia, too?). We’ll brainstorm with you about how to best use these sites in your marketing program.

For an expert approach to Constant Contact, WordPress, Survey Monkey and other online tools, contactJonathan Lehrer Communications / The Message Engineers.

The author co-founded The Message Engineers, which provides public relations and crisis communications planning to government agencies, non-profit organizations and business.