Up Against the Clock: Why Your Timing Matters During a Crisis

If you talk to media and communications professionals about the aspects of their work that have changed most in recent years, they would likely mention the speed with which information is transmitted – and when it comes to crisis communications, that couldn’t be more true.

The rise of smartphones, social media platforms, and the breaking news landscape have fundamentally changed what a good crisis response looks like. News seems to travel at the speed of light, and if your organization isn’t nimble enough to respond quickly to a crisis, you will almost certainly lose the ability to influence how the events are perceived. In the face of a public crisis, the first-mover advantage is one of the most important factors in determining who controls the narrative when an incident is unfolding, and failing to act quickly enough can have detrimental impacts on an organization’s reputation and can damage the trust of its stakeholders. To act effectively and quickly in a crisis, there are a few best practices that organizations should keep in mind.

Have a plan in place.

One of the surest ways to respond quickly to a crisis is to have a plan ready to go in the first place. Instead of having a statement held up by your legal counsel or leadership team, prepare in advance by having a general draft statement for crisis situations that your internal stakeholders are comfortable with. You can also tailor your crisis plan to assign roles and responsibilities, and put a process in place to make sure you can move quickly when an incident arises. Taking these steps can significantly shorten the amount of time it takes to get a statement approved and distributed when you have minutes, and not hours, to work with.

Get your first response right.

When United Airlines underwent scrutiny for an incident involving a doctor who was dragged off of a domestic flight in 2017, the company cycled through a number of responses over the course of a week. When you look at each of their messages, it becomes apparent that the biggest mistake they made in their first response was not addressing what happened to the passenger. They did initially issue an apology in their Monday morning response following the incident – but the apology was for the overbooked flight, and did not even acknowledge the passenger who was harmed or the video that captured the incident.

It can be difficult to respond in a crisis without complete information – but whether you have all of the information or not, there is usually an opportunity to express empathy or concern for the people involved. Showing your concern can have a big impact on the quality of your initial response, and can allow you to move quickly to get in front of an incident as the facts come to light.

Make sure your message is distributed to different audiences on multiple platforms.

When a crisis is unfolding, making sure your message is communicated effectively to different stakeholders is just as important as having the right message in the first place. Having a statement for inquiring media is just one aspect of effective crisis messaging – an organization also needs to think about its employees, investors, business partners, and community stakeholders. If you were a mid-level employee at a pharmaceutical company that had just come under investigation for marketing a drug that had devastating side effects, would you rather hear about it from a breaking news alert, or from your company’s leadership? Having a strategy for the different audiences who would need to hear from you – and making sure you have the right channels to communicate with those audiences – is critical to maintaining trust with those individuals.

In the face of a difficult situation, organizations can very easily get caught up in delays and cumbersome decision-making that impacts their timeliness on a response – but if you and your team can be prepared in advance, nimble, and strategic in your communications strategy, you can have more control over a crisis than you might think.