Page 58 - Crisis Communication Practical PR Strategies

Proactive Crisis Communication Planning 39
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the company. If this is the case, then Appendix 1 (see page 207) shows
a basic sheet that can be worked through in under an hour (getting
everyone to agree may take longer) and will provide the necessary
factual information for both a crisis plan and also ongoing proactive
media relations.
With an understanding of the company’s basic facts, the crisis team
needs to develop a messaging document and agree upon it. This mes-
saging document has three stages to it:

1. By looking at various areas of the business, we can identify core
messages to be used with the media pre-crisis.
2. Following from that, it is easier to anticipate situations that may go
against the main messaging, and then clearly identify how the
organization should respond.
3. We can now identify questions that the media may ask of the
organization and then develop standard answers.

A suggested work plan can be seen in Appendix 2 (see page 210).

Target
Who are the stakeholders of your organization? Basically, when you
find yourself in a crisis, who will it affect? We identify these groups now
because, 1) we don’t want to forget a group in the heat of the moment,
and 2) the better we can target groups of people, the better we can
target the correct press to communicate with them.
Most usually, an organization will want to take care of the following
people:

employees;
customers;
prospective customers;
suppliers;
investors (both private and institutional);
community members.

If your company is publicly held, then there will be a number of other
stakeholders – some of these are identified further in Chapter 5 where
we take a closer look at financial issues.