Coombs 5 - Crisis Preparation
Minji Kim, Ramon Looby & Emel Ozdora
This reading from Ongoing Crisis Communication will review for you the process of establishing a crisis management plan as well as identifying organizational vulnerabilities and crisis types appropriate for the organization. The task: You will provide a 500 word comment that summarizes three key points that you don’t want your peers to miss in the chapter and raises at least three questions or discussion points for consideration by the class. Doc students: remember that you, especially, should be looking for theoretical points and not just application.
This reading from Ongoing Crisis Communication will review for you the process of establishing a crisis management plan as well as identifying organizational vulnerabilities and crisis types appropriate for the organization. The task: You will provide a 500 word comment that summarizes three key points that you don’t want your peers to miss in the chapter and raises at least three questions or discussion points for consideration by the class. Doc students: remember that you, especially, should be looking for theoretical points and not just application.
posted by prteacher at
3/28/2007 06:27:00 AM
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Chapter 5 – Crisis Preparation
Crisis preparation is an ongoing process organization need to be involved in through environmental scanning in order to monitor their publics and issues surrounding the organization and the industry. Diagnosing your organization’s vulnerabilities through environmental scanning should be the first step of crisis preparation. You have to know potential dangers in order to be prepared for them.
There are three important aspects of crisis preparation and these are: establishing a crisis management team, developing a crisis management plan, and training your spokespeople. These seem to be the major components of crisis preparation that practitioners should be involved in and they the three important points in this chapter that I want to focus on.
Crisis management teams are composed of a cross-functional group of people in the organization who have been designated to handle crises. This team is responsible from creating the crisis management plan, enacting the plan, and dealing with any problems or issues that may arise during the crisis, which the plan may not cover.
Some of the tasks the team needs to have expertise in are: the decision-making, working as team, enacting the crisis communication plan, and listening. This group should realize its mission and work toward developing a good crisis communication plan and also assist the organization in educating employees about potential crisis and what they need to do. Being involved in internal communication should be another task this group needs to have that the book doesn’t mention.
Crisis management plan should be detailed, but it should not be a limiting document. It should allow for flexibility in order to be applied to different and unexpected situations. It should be a guideline that can be used easily. You do not want to have a very strict plan because you might not have strong control over the situation and you might have to improvise as the crisis management team. The crisis management plan should be seen as a document that is living and open for revisions and improvements.
Training your Spokespeople is also a major part of crisis preparation. Having a spokespeople is not only having a voice for your organization, but it is also important for having someone to manage the accuracy and consistency of the messages coming from the organization. Consistency and accuracy become very important concepts during crisis communication – whatever you do you need to make sure that you are open and willing to communicate, in addition to being accurate and consistent in your communications.
Some qualities you want in your spokesperson would be: being pleasant on camera, answering questions effectively, presenting crisis information clearly and being able to handle difficult questions.
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emelo, at 10:09 PM
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