 Growing up, I spent my summers working in a small amusement park located near my hometown. And I was a supervisor in the major rides area. We would spend time, of course, training people on how the rides operate and what to do to keep them running, but we spent a lot of time talking about what to do when things go wrong and how to be prepared for if the ride breaks down, if a customer gets sick, if a customer gets angry with you, all these different types of situations where things go wrong, how do we deal with that? And we spent a lot of time preparing for that in advance because we knew they were coming and we wanted people to know how to respond in that situation. No matter what organization you're a part of, you're going to have crises and so it's an imperative part of organizational communication to be prepared for those crises and in fact have a plan for when crises do occur and when negative things happen. In this video, we'll take a look at what it means to develop a crisis communication plan and be effective in planning for these worst-case scenarios. So let's take a look at the crisis plan checklist. What should be on our checklist in terms of preparing for and planning for a crisis? First of all, we have to make sure that our leadership is visible. We can't have the leaders of our organization go somewhere and hide and avoid the public, avoid the media, avoid everything. In fact, just the opposite, we need our leadership and the faces of our organization to be out front and visible in communicating what's going on and what we're doing as a result and how our organization is working to resolve this crisis, even if it's not something of our own making or even something that directly affects us. It's just something, you know, a natural disaster in our community or something. What is our organization doing? Our leadership needs to be the ones to present that. They need to be visible both for the sake of the employees seeing that happen and also the community. So our leadership has to be visible in these situations. We also need to, prior to any crisis, really, as we go along here, we need to be doing vulnerability analysis within our organization. What are some areas where, you know, things could crop up? If you're an organization, you work for a company that deals with dangerous chemicals. What happens if there's a chemical spill or if there's something about those chemicals that affects the community? We need to know that. That's a clear vulnerability for us and a potential crisis situation that could come up. So we need to have a plan for how we're going to respond and deal with that situation if it does occur. You know, even if it's not going on right now, we need to be prepared for that. And we need to just be really clear in looking at our organization and saying, Okay, these are the areas where there could be trouble potentially and seems most likely that there would be trouble. And how do we have a plan or what plan do we have to deal with that when those situations do occur? We need to have procedures in place for when those situations come up. If these vulnerability analyses that we're doing, if we find something to be more likely than maybe some others, okay, let's put a plan in place. Let's have some procedures in place so that we can pull it out of the file and say, Okay, here's what we need to do so that everybody's prepared. Like I talked about when I was working at that amusement park, we talked about things that most employees would probably never see happen. What if the ride breaks down in the middle of while you're running it? What do you do? We would drill them on that constantly. And though there was a 95% chance that that was not going to happen them ever in their time at the park, we wanted them to be prepared for if that 5% did occur. They would know immediately what to do their procedures in place. There are ways that we handle this. And they know what they are in there prepared to do that to help keep people safe and help people maintain their confidence in the in the organization as well. So we need to have those procedures in place. We need to plan for the worst case scenarios. You hope for the best and plan for the worst, right? So we need to plan for what happens if the worst happens. What are our procedures? How do we handle that? How do we communicate that to the public? How do we try and protect people, of course, their safety and their lives and also protect our organization's reputation hopefully and viability to continue. So we need to plan for the worst case scenarios, have some of those procedures in place and we need to identify them early through those vulnerability analysis. And then when it does happen, if it does happen, unfortunately, then we need to have our leadership visible and be out front on these things. One new wrinkle in public relations in modern times, of course, is the development of social media and the impact that it can have in a crisis. So let's take a look at some of the just kind of positive and negative attributes and aspects of having social media as a part of our response in a crisis and part of our world now. First, on the positive side, we can see that social media, first of all, allows us direct access to our publics. It's direct. It's a direct connection. There's no middleman. We don't have to rely on somebody else. It's not a game and telephone where things are going to get messed up slowly as the message gets sent out. We can communicate directly now with our publics through social media. And that's that's a good thing. That's helpful at times. It's immediate. We can get word out right away if there's an incident. We don't have to wait. If you're, you know, a part of an organization or even this university, you know that when a disaster happens or there's something critically happening, then they can reach you immediately through social media. You can get a text alert. You can see it on Twitter. You can they'll email you all of these ways that they'll communicate. It's immediate. There's no more having to go through the news media and hope somebody sees it on the TV or in the newspaper or whatever. We can reach people directly and immediately. And then of course, there's a rapid spread as people spread the word. They share it easily via social media. We can get a rapid spread of our message and have it sent broadly in a very short amount of time. So we have that directness, the immediateness and the rapid spread that are positives in what we can do with social media during a crisis. However, there is a flip side. Of course, there are some negatives that come into play here. First, our message could get lost in the noise. There's so much on social media that it is possible for what we say to just get lost. It gets buried in somebody's feed and they never see it. It could get lost in that noise. We also have to remember there's a sense of permanence too. What if we send a message and it's the wrong message or it's something we wish we could take back? You can delete that post or whatever, but we all know that really it's permanent. Somebody's probably taking a screenshot of it. It's probably making the rounds or whatever. And there's, I mean, electronically nothing ever goes away. So there's a permanence. We want to be sure that we're very careful about what we're expressing via social media as well. And then of course, no matter what, you're going to have trolls. You're just going to have people in the matter what your message is, even if it's benevolent, even if it's intended to be as positive as possible and helpful and looking out for the community. Somebody's going to take issue with it. Somebody's going to trash it. Somebody's going to come back with some smart aleck comment. And so they're always going to be trolls and we have to be prepared for that as well. It opens up the floodgates for people to pile on in a negative way via social media. So social media can have a very positive effect and can be used very effectively in a crisis. It can also be sort of a challenge though in some ways and we need to be aware of that. So when we're using social media in a crisis, there are a couple of guidelines to keep in mind. First of all, we want to use it to provide real time updates. We have that immediacy, so we want to use it to communicate with people in real time and not keep them waiting. We want to be transparent with these things and provide real time updates in as much as we can and as much as is wise to do so. We also want to put the word out quickly and widely, right? Put the word out quickly, widely. We want to get that word out in whatever message we want to share. We just want to assume it's going to go to the entire world and hopefully quickly. So those are the types of message we want to get out when we have something that we need to express to a mass audience and need to do so in a really fast rate of speed. Social media is the go to there. We do want to be sure that you were using one voice as an organization, meaning in social media, you don't want different posts from different departments and different leaders and different that you want to have in a crisis situation, one voice. The public should be able to go to one social media feed or address. You can have it on different platforms, but there ought to be one voice from the organization. Everybody else directing people to that specific channel or handle or feed or whatever and using one voice to communicate in the midst of a crisis so you don't have conflicting information. You don't have mixed messages. You just have one voice and speaking as a whole unit. You don't want to consider the media needs. If you have a chance to give the media a heads up, now this is a social media allows you to communicate directly with an audience and do so immediately, but you also have the media to consider in terms of maintaining positive relationships there. Give them a tip. Give them a heads up. Hey, we're about to release something. Keep an eye on our Twitter feed. We're going to have some information there or providing things electronically in a central area on your website, for example, where they can go to get news releases and get information like that. The media really appreciates anything you can do to make their job easier and to consider their needs in these types of situations as well. And finally, don't forget your employees. Keep your employees in the loop and make sure that they understand what's going on. Hopefully they're not getting the word from social media. Maybe you have a separate internal social media channel or communication channel that you can use to keep employees in the loop, but you can use social media to keep employees in the loop and make sure that they have an understanding of what's going on as well. But then we do need to remember that we need to be accessible through all of this. We can use social media to be accessible to our audiences to be accessible to the media, be accessible to the public to answer questions as best we can, which can get overwhelming, but we want to use it in such a way that it creates that relational two-way communication with our public in these types of situations that's incredibly important. So we know that there are a lot of stages to the crisis management process here, but it starts with being prepared. It begins with being prepared and as we talked about having that crisis plan in place, and then that allows you to respond in an effective way and in a more efficient way. So then we can, once we can do that, we can then move into the recovery phase as quickly as possible, where we're we're making restitution or we're correcting things, we're setting things right as much as possible and restoring the reputation of our organization and the confidence of the public has in us, and then we can move into mitigation and prevention. What can we do differently to make sure this doesn't happen again? We can, you know, what changes can we make to the process so that we can avoid these things in the future, and then we shift back into preparedness. Okay, now we reset, we look at, again, what are the potential crises and where are we vulnerable? We can do that vulnerability analysis and engage that in preparedness, and it just goes around. It's not a matter of if you have a crisis in an organization, it's a matter of when, how prepared are you, and how do you respond then as a result. So now you have a better understanding, I hope, of the importance of a crisis communication plan and the role that it plays in successfully navigating these situations as an organization.