Where Do You Stand?

In a perfect world, every single one of our clients would have a crisis communications plan. No, the Standing staff isn’t part of some crazed doomsday cult predicting disaster at every turn (although if you flip around our website fast enough, it can look a little psychedelic.) We’ve just had too many frantic midnight or weekend calls from clients (or imminently-about-to-be clients) saying, “You know when you asked us to prepare a crisis plan in advance of a crisis, and we said no? Yeah, we really should have done that.”  

Crises happen. And, being crises, they usually happen with alarming speed and when you least expect it. My children’s preschool just weathered a serious crisis - one of their kitchen helpers was arrested on child pornography and molestation charges. Although not involving any of the kids at the school, it still could have destroyed the stellar reputation this school enjoys.

Fortunately, they had a crisis communications plan ready to go (and no, Standing didn’t write it - I’m not tooting our own horn here). School administrators personally called every single child’s parents a full two days before news of the arrest hit the media to alert everyone. They brought in a counselor to talk to any parents or children who needed one and stayed late every night to talk with concerned parents. They then followed up with a letter outlining their cooperation with the police investigation, a reiteration that no child at the school had been harmed, the cell phone numbers for every administrator to ensure they could be reached at any time, and a list of the additional steps they’d taken to further strengthen school security and employee oversight.

As a parent, I was grateful for their professionalism and comforted by their intensive efforts to work with the police and ensure no child at the school had been harmed. As a communications professional, I was thrilled to see they had a plan, that they worked the plan, and that the plan worked - not one child was removed from the school, and they actually had an increase in new enrollment calls the week after the story broke, with many interested parents saying that the way they handled the crisis gave them even more confidence about the school’s safety.

If that doesn’t convince you, check out author and Fast Company co-founder Bill Taylor’s great blog on the really dumb things that happen to really smart business leaders. Notice I said just “really smart.” The smartest business leaders have a crisis plan ready to go when those really dumb things happen. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Crisis Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.