6 Crisis Communication Plan Examples & How To Write Your Own

These steps ensure information reaches employees, partners, customers, media, the general public, and any other valuable stakeholders. A crisis communication plan is a set of guidelines used to prepare a business for an emergency or unexpected event.

• Identify point people who can go into action quickly, notify appropriate help, and manage evacuation plans.
• This is also a moment to explore whether your personnel practices are equitable.
• These different responses run the risk of cancelling each other out and further eroding that shelter’s credibility with the public.
• When your company makes a mistake, the best thing you can do is to apologize and be human.
• But, regardless of how you use it, social media can’t be ignored when your company is working through a crisis.

As you could imagine, participants of this fad got sick from consuming laundry detergent and Tide had to release a campaign warning customers not to consume its product. Safe to say, the company’s marketing team definitely didn’t expect this issue to come across their desks. While it’s hard to consider grim crises like these, they do occur and impact businesses. Even though Southwest had never encountered an accident like this before, the CEO was prepared for this situation and demonstrated genuine remorse both through his words and his company’s actions.

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All these questions can be addressed with the help of a communication plan. Download a free template by clicking the button below.

These plans include steps to take when a crisis first emerges, how to communicate with the public, and how to prevent the issue from occurring again. A crisis communications plan serves a few purposes. It provides guidelines on who and what you need to communicate during an emergency. It sets up your organization to remain credible and trustworthy by being prepared and focused on transparency, dispelling rumors, and reducing fear and panic. Someone on this team should also be designated as your organization’s main spokesperson. Again, it depends on the situation, but it’s most likely to be your executive director or head of communications.

While your communication plan will differ depending on the crisis you’re dealing with, below are some common strategies that businesses use to deliver an effective response. All of HubSpot’s marketing, sales CRM, customer service, CMS, and operations software on one platform. Share your expertise, but be sure it’s appropriate to your organization and industry. In case of a natural disaster, use your voice and influence to amplify crucial messages from leaders and experts. Focus on accurate information that is relevant to your organization and your audience.

It might well be the time to reimagine who you are and what you do and to make your organization better in the process. Depending on how large your team is, you might be working with the marketing team as well as your customer support team to cover every possible avenue for communication. As prepared as your organization may be, there are always elements of your crisis strategy that you’ll need to tailor to the individual situation. Many organizations only get their crisis plans underway once a disaster has struck. Joanne Fritz is the expert on nonprofit organizations and philanthropy for The Balance Small Business. The most important thing is to keep stakeholders informed when a crisis hits, so they know your organization prioritizes the safety of customers over saving face or maintaining profits. Some crises occur when customers tamper with products and try to create media attention or drum up a lawsuit.

The public’s response was to chuckle and donate money! The quick and witty reply to the situation worked, and the Red Cross is currently enjoying some free PR. This is why a crisis communication plan is essential for restaurants. Some scenarios you’ll want to plan for are the spread of food-borne illness, unsanitary working conditions, and, of course, delivery issues affecting food supply. If you’re familiar with Tide Pods, then you might remember that trend when people were eating them — yes, eating.

When your funding depends on not offending the people who keep you afloat with their money, it’s important to keep your public relations dealings in check. Unfortunately, these five examples forgot to remember this during their big goofs. Additionally, you should set a deadline for when these fact sheets will be prepared. Depending on the crisis, you may need them within 24 hours, six hours, or even 30 minutes. When writing the plan, it’s important to know who the plan is designed for. Outline a list of all stakeholders you’d want to keep informed about the crisis.

What Is A Crisis Communication Plan And How Can You Build One For Your Nonprofit?

If that crisis happens, people will appreciate your forethought. During my nonprofit career, organizations I have worked for have experienced a client’s death; a product tampering that threatened a primary fundraiser; an athletic scandal; and a mass shooting on campus. You need to formulate your message to satisfy each audience’s need to know that you are in charge, you understand the problem and you’re working to fix it or offset the damage.

Under each plan, you should list out the potential risks you’ll face. That way, if the plan does backfire, you won’t be caught off guard. You will have prepared yourself and aid out steps for recuperating from these additional losses. When faced with an unhappy or escalated customer, our success team recognizes this as a chance to collect customer feedback. They begin interactions by asking customers to review their experience and discuss any elements that were unsatisfactory. This helps our team create actionable steps that they can use to align themselves with the customer’s needs.

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Marketers released videos of the canning process and invited reporters to tour their facilities. Once the FDA cleared Pepsi and surveillance videos were catching people putting objects in cans, the media and general public agreed the crisis was a hoax. On Flight 1380, an engine malfunction resulted in the death of a passenger and was recorded as the company’s first in-flight fatality. The company’s CEO, Gary Kelly, immediately responded to the situation by offering a sincere, heartfelt apology to the victim’s family.

When your company makes a mistake, the best thing you can do is to apologize and be human. The most effective way to do that is to assign a spokesperson to speak on your brand’s behalf. After all, it’s a lot easier to relate to one person than a group of lawyers. Use HubSpot’s Crisis Communication Plan Template to build out your company’s own plan. Included are charts, sections, and prompts to help you document your company’s strategy when a crisis hits.

Response Plan

You can even craft specific responses to the most likely crises you think could befall your operation. For instance, a fire at your nonprofit daycare center would require a different reply than a child’s death from choking. A statement following the death of the company’s CEO from natural causes would be quite different from one following the fatal shooting of the CEO and several board members by a former employee. Similarly, a community-wide power outage would be handled differently than the issue of exploding manhole covers maiming several citizens. Instead of freaking out, denying everything and firing the employee, the company responded with a humorous comment about taking the tweeter’s keys.

Each member has a role in either making crucial crisis communications decisions and approvals, serving as strong and sincere spokespersons, creating crisis messaging and materials, and disseminating crisis messages. When you’re creating your crisis communications plan, keep in mind that there are a few types of emergencies a nonprofit organization may face.

That way, you’ll feel a little more prepared no matter what comes up. Put together a media training program before disaster strikes. That might be your board chair, your CEO and other key staff, such as a media relations person.

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The person chosen to speak for you then needs to accurately represent what your organization’s leadership has decided as a group. For a small nonprofit like yours, which likely has a local focus, gossip can spread particularly fast, making misinformation and misinterpretation key problems at times. Core constituents.These are the central direct beneficiaries of the organization’s efforts. Your success depends on knowing the answers to these questions and acting accordingly. Reimagining an organization is hard, especially during a crisis. Leaders who are overwhelmed with day-to-day surprises, urgent short-term demands, and a gnawing sense of uncertainty often don’t feel able to take on another challenge.

That way, you can constantly iterate on your response and ensure it’s as good as it can be for future crises (since as much as we hope an emergency won’t happen again… it probably will). After the crisis you’re facing has passed, or even during various steps of the crisis, it’s important to have regular check-ins amongst the team responsible for handling it. Based on all of these things, your response may need to change as time goes on. Outlining potential ways the situation might go when it first starts can help you prepare for the worst (or for the best!) without getting trapped in a spiral of despair. People will start to get more stressed and worried if they can see that there are unanswered questions on your Facebook wall.

Next Steps

Being in the center of a crisis is the perfect time to create one. Your insight into crisis communications has never been better. The Virginia Department of Education has created a lengthy management plan including crisis communications. The plan highlights various crises that would require communication with parents — such as a school bus accident — and gives letter templates that can be quickly sent out. The University of Washington has an extensive crisis communication plan geared towards preserving the safety and security of community members. As a university, the main audiences for communication include students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni, as well as visitors, temporary residents, the general public, and media.

For example, you might be sending out Tweets every thirty minutes, and only updating your supporters via email every few days. “If you’ve built up a social media presence, that should be one of the places where you are communicating,” said Holly.

At HubSpot, our security team sends out routine training videos to educate employees about different security protocols. The videos are short and the multiple-choice quizzes are so light-hearted that they act as additional learning tools in case you didn’t pay close attention to the video. This makes the training easily consumed, and, more importantly, successful in teaching employees how to protect company data.

Before coming to Qgiv, she worked as a director of annual giving and used her digital marketing savvy to lead several successful giving days. When she’s not at Qgiv analyzing social media stats, she can be found binge-watching Parks and Rec and taking photos of everyone else’s pets. Some issues might just require close monitoring while others may require a press release that’s approved by your CEO. But, KFC’s marketing team quickly got to work and was able to put a positive spin on the situation. They released videos and tweets like the one below that light-heartedly apologized for the shortage and showed off the brand’s humility. Similar to universities, schools need to deal with crises efficiently, especially if they impact the normal class schedule. Since schools deal with children, it’s especially crucial that parents and guardians are made aware of any situations that could affect the education, safety, or health of their kids.