Crisis Communication Plan

Hello everybody,

For this post i would like to talk about Crisis Communication in PR and its importance as well as consequences.

Doing my internship at the Central Water Authority, last week (3 April) there happened to be a very important issue if not dramatic incident involving heavy oil being poured into water to be consumed by the habitants of Lallmatie (Mauritius).

Indeed this has been a crisis situation involving the CWA. The communication Officer was very busy going onsite, solving the problem and calming the habitants as the incident involved children being severely ill and hospitalized due to this water contamination.

Crisis communication is a primordial tool of the PR profession designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization facing a public challenge to its reputation.

In the case of the CWA, the challenges came in the form of investigation from media inquiry, violation of environmental regulation and a number of situations involving legal,ethical, and financial issues.

When the reputation of a company is under attack, protecting and defending it becomes the biggest priority and this is done though effective crisis communication plan

When events like this happen, the media firestorm can quickly overwhelm the ability of the entity to effectively respond to the demands of the crisis. To emerge with its reputation intact, an organization must anticipate every move and respond immediately and with confidence.

Effectively responding to the challenges of a crisis requires more than the typical skills of the public relations professional, requiring instead experience at the highest levels of the field, such as investigative reporting.

Crisis communication includes crafting messages often tested by research and polling. A rapid response capability is an essential element of crisis communication.

Additional tactics includes proactive media outreach to get messages and context to the media, identifying and recruiting credible third party allies who can attest to the company’s side of the story, and striking first, not waiting to be hit.

Responding quickly, efficiently, effectively and in a premeditated way are the primary objectives of an effective crisis communication strategy.

The inherent lag time in formulating responses to a crisis can result in considerable losses to company revenues, reputation as well as substantially impacting on costs.

Coming back to the incidents, everything has been handled effectively and things are back to normal thank to the communication officer who did things with dexterity and passed messaged to the media in a timely manner. He also found the very right words to communicate to the population and the media. Unfortunately i was not able to accompany the communication officer on spot as he had to do thing very rapidly but nevertheless i was able to listen when he had the media on the phone. Here also he used very tactical communication to talk to the press, without reviling too much information, effectivly comforting the press and spoke very confidently.