Will your crisis communication plan make you or break you?

If your corporate crisis plan needs some TLC or you’re thinking, “What crisis communication plan?”, please keep reading.

Sometimes businesses are faced with a crisis – an event that occurs suddenly, unexpectedly, and demands an extremely quick response. It interferes with your normal routine and often creates uncertainty and stress for your employees and/or community. Without a responsible press office (even if it’s one employee) with an executable communication plan, a crisis can threaten and/or severely damage the reputation of an organization to internal and external publics.

With layoffs, furloughs and financial crisis affecting businesses large and small, it’s more important than ever to put a crisis communication plan into place. (Ok, it’s probably much more important for the AIG press office than yours right now, but still a must-have.)

A crisis can also involve a natural disaster, an accident at the company or unfavorable personal information about a top executive. Whatever your crisis is, a well-managed plan cannot only preserve reputations of a company and its top management, but can enhance your credibility if you do it right.

Here’s 5 tips to help you update or start your crisis communication plan:

1. Have a WRITTEN crisis plan. A crisis plan isn’t a crisis plan until you put it in writing and distribute it to top management

2. Include action items in your plan such as: identify and classify the situation, inform everyone who needs to know about the situation, identify your spokespeople, and formulate a media message

2. In a time of a crisis, go public immediately, but only with what you know. If you don’t know anything, please don’t say “no comment” – it’s sneaky and the media will tear you apart, even if you’re not trying to hide anything

3. Get top management to the crisis site if needed

4. Inform your internal publics

5. Update external and internal publics frequently and regularly