A crisis is something that no organisation wants to go through – but one that every company should prepare for. An Oxford Metrica study of 2010 stated that executives have an 82% chance of facing a corporate disaster in any five-year period, so every business should have crisis/issues and reputation management on their radar at all times.
If there’s an issue affecting your organisation that is likely to be of interest to a wide audience, journalists may start contacting you. While you may already have journalist contacts that you speak with regularly, the list of journalists interested may widen in times of crisis. It may be that news reporters start to contact you, for example, so you will need to provide a short educational statement to give context and clarity about your organisation.
This should be a short paragraph detailing a brief history of your company, its aims and key facts and figures. This short statement may need to be altered, depending on the issue – you don’t want to be highlighting that you’ve got 1,000 staff if you’re making large-scale redundancies. But it should provide a clear and concise statement about the organisation, its locations, customer base and anything else that you feel may be of relevance. But it needs to be short. An already approved boilerplate, such as the text usually used for press releases, is usually a good place to start.
Rostrum hosts a one-day training workshop for businesses to help prepare for – and tackle – a crisis. Using practical scenarios, participants are guided through the different types of crisis that can affect an organisation, and how to get back to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible. These can be tailored to your company. To book a course or find out more, check out our training site and the issues management workshop.
