The Value in Crisis Management Planning

Media Policy Turning A Public Crisis Around Interviews Home

There is value in having an effective Crisis Management Plan in place before you need one. The time you and your management team spend putting the plan together will be repaid many times when you are called to use it. Time is in short supply when a crisis breaks. Being able to refer to your plan and start doing the right things immediately will save you much pain and aggravation down the road. Without it, you can quickly lose control while you decide who needs to be called, look up their phone numbers, and try to figure out what to do when the person you want doesn't answer the phone. Those looking to see how you respond to this crisis will not be impressed if you are stumbling all over yourself. Such incompetence will leave them wondering if they should trust you to run the organization. Conversely, an organization that quickly implements a well thought-out crisis communications plan has a chance to take advantage of a limited window of opportunity. An example of this occurred in 1998 in the skiing industry. Within five days of each other, Michael Kennedy and Sonny Bono were killed in skiing accidents. The tendency of the media might have been to raise fears about the declining safety of the sport. Taken to an extreme, this could have severely impacted the industry. What prevented that from happening? The National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) had a crisis plan developed that they could immediately implement. Part of that plan included the compilation of statistics that proved that the accident rate continued to average 36 fatalities a year for the past couple of years. Within two hours after the first reports of Kennedy's death, the Association faxed nine pages of information to the media and to their member ski resorts. This allowed those resorts to respond properly to local media inquiries with consistent information. They also were able to quickly get in touch with a Ph.D. who had studied ski injuries for 30 years. He was offered to the media as an objective authority on the subject. What saved the NSAA from seeing these two tragic accidents spiral into a crisis for the whole industry was the fact that they had a crisis plan ready. Right after the accident, they did not have to create a plan, look up the statistics, try to find an authoritative third-party source and figure out how to contact him. The message that ended up being communicated was that skiing was a relatively safe sport if the skiers followed basic safety practices. Top