Project 3: Plan for a Crisis: Compose Annexes
Step 8: Track Incoming Communications
How will you gather information about incoming communications?
You may have noticed phone logs and other incoming communication tracking tools in some of the sample plans you reviewed in Step 1. Develop the logs you believe your team would need based on your core plan and other annexes. You basically want to give your client a way to know who contacted you, when, from where, why, and what you did about it.
Note that these forms might help you track the sentiment of your publics and be part of your formative evaluation plan.
Your forms should be as simple as possible; your harried communications staff will not want to hunt for the right field to fill in as they respond to a flood of angry callers.
Here’s an example. There are many more in the plans listed in Step 1 and in the Crisis Communications Planning learning topic.
Who When Why Where Phone number Response Follow-up needed? Notes
Draw up the annex(es) you’ll need for this area of crisis communications planning.
In the next step, you’ll consider the legal and ethical implications of the crisis, as per Dana’s list of questions.
Step 9: Abide by Legal and Ethical Principles
How will you abide by laws and ethical principles?
Now, draw up an annex or two to address ethical and legal considerations.
Remind your staff about the organization’s ethical standards, which must be upheld ALL THE TIME!!! In a crisis, it might be tempting to hide information or make the client appear less culpable. Maybe you’d be tempted to fudge dates or times of response. When in crisis mode, with everyone looking at you, it’s more important than ever to uphold the organization’s ethical standards.
Regarding legal matters, at the very least, you’ll have to provide a form at the beginning of your crisis communications plan to be signed off by a legal representative of your organization as well as the other members of the crisis management team. Of what other legal matters should your team be aware as it fulfills its roles and responsibilities? Are there any First Amendment or other Constitutional issues to which to direct your team’s attention?
Draw up the annex(es) you’ll need for this area of crisis communications planning.
Ethical and Legal Communications Aids
Here are some aids from past projects that might help you in this step.
• Ethics in Strategic Communications
• Ethical Issues in Event Planning
• Strategic Communications and the Law
• Legal Issues in Event Planning
In the next step, you’ll create an evaluation form as per the prompts in Dana’s email to help you and your team improve the plan following the crisis.
Step 10: Consider Summative Evaluation
12. How will you know how to improve your plan for next time?
As your plan is being implemented, the communications team will be gathering formative evaluation data to help guide its efforts, as laid out in the timeline. Here, you will focus on the other kind of evaluation—summative evaluation—which will help inform future planning endeavors.
Your communications plan isn’t meant for one-time use. Although you hope to not experience this type of crisis again, you might very well do so, or you might experience a similar type of crisis. Even if you don’t, you might learn lessons that you can apply to other crisis communications plans.
You’ll have a brief window as your crisis wraps up during which the feelings of your internal publics will be potent enough for them to convey accurately how they felt about the crisis communications efforts. What information will you want from these publics? Think about content, timing, and so forth.
You will, of course, have lots of good data from the formative evaluation efforts. Once you’ve identified what else you need to know, determine how you will gather the data. Will you meet in a room with the crisis management team and have a post-mortem? Will you send out an anonymous poll? Will you develop a summative evaluation form as described on p. 367 of Fearn-Banks?
Outline at least one summative evaluation tool and describe how you would deploy it. This could be an elaboration on a tool you identified in Project 2.
Draw up the annex(es) you’ll need for this area of crisis communications planning.