Crisis Communication

Be Proactive, Not Reactive

In my Issues Management class I had last semester, I had a hard time first understanding when my professor began to explain why a crisis is normally predictable. I was only thinking of hurricanes or some other “act of God.” But the more we went through the class, the more I realized that 9 out of 10 times, your organization should have had some idea that something was brewing. Through media scanning and watching over public interest groups, if your organization is being mentioned in something that is going to require some issues management, then you should know about it and fix it before it becomes a crisis. Take Enron for example. There were people in that company who knew what were going on. Maybe had something been said before it was too late the company could have been saved. Instead the people who knew what were going on stayed quiet, a crisis occurred and the company went bankrupt.

I really like the follwing model that kind of shows the cycle of an emerging crisis. If you want go to the website and it goes into more deatil about each stage.

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