Lessons Learned: Crisis Communication in the Wake of Tragedy

 

Youngstown State University defines their crisis communication plan as a part of larger set of plans to manage the university’s affairs situations that threaten their operations or safety of their community. Ready.gov defines crisis communications plans as an important component of a business’ preparedness program. They both sound like fancy sentences, but the message is the same. If and when your organization is faced with an expected challenge, have clear steps in place. Be transparent. Mitigate negative impact. It doesn’t matter if you are a big box store, a university, or a luxury vehicle company you should have a crisis communication plan set in place.

 Key components of a crisis communication plan often include:

1. Preparation: Identifying potential crises, establishing a crisis team, and defining roles and responsibilities.
2. Response Protocols: Clear guidelines on how to respond promptly, including designated spokespeople, communication channels, and decision-making processes.
3. Message Development: Crafting appropriate messages tailored to different stakeholders, ensuring consistency, transparency, and empathy.
4. Communication Channels: Determining which platforms (social media, press releases, website, etc.) will be used.
5. Training: Regular training sessions to prepare team members for crisis scenarios, ensuring they understand their roles and can respond effectively under pressure.
6. Monitoring and Evaluation: Continuous monitoring of the situation, gathering feedback, and evaluating the effectiveness of the response to make necessary adjustments.
7. Post-Crisis Evaluation: Analyzing the response after the crisis has subsided to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in the communication plan.

I have been a working professional for about a decade now. Luckily, I have not had to implement a plan of my own. But I have witnessed many organizations in crisis mode firsthand. About six years ago a young lady at the high school I was working at unfortunately lost her life to suicide. There is a designated counselor at our school who works with suicide prevention, so they did already have a plan in place on the aftermath if something like this were to ever happen. How to handle the grief with the students, faculty, and staff. The principals and administrators were very respectful, and I remember hearing about them visiting with the girl’s family at their home. But what I don’t think they could have prepared for was the aftermath in the weeks and months to come. After she had passed students lined the halls with teddy bears, posters, drawings, pictures, all kinds of beautiful artwork to memorialize her. A few weeks had gone by and over a long weekend one of the administrators picked up all of the stuff students had laid out for her. When students returned to school, they were livid. I don’t think you can really blame the students for being upset that their memorial items were gone. For most of them, they were experiencing a new kind of grief and to see the items missing it was like experiencing another loss. At that age though and in a moment of justified rage, high school students are not going to jump to a logical conclusion that something appropriate was done with their items. Rumors began to spread like wildfire. Within minutes the story was that the administrator had gone through the halls ripping down the posters and pictures, throwing everything in the trash. Students were calling their parents crying telling them what this man had done. Parents were posting horror stories on Facebook. Facebook was tagging news station. And by 5 PM the local news station was at our high school to report the alleged story. It was horrific. I personally knew the administrator and knew his intentions were not ill, but the school was in a touchy position and did not know how to react. From what I understand the first thing they did was reach out to the family and apologize for negative attention they may be getting. They then released a message to the press clarifying what had happened. The administrator spoke to the family about the memorial items beforehand and let them know he would we safely removing them while school was closed and would save them in a shadowbox for the family to keep. He had carefully removed all items and stored them in a locked room until the family was ready to receive them.

What They Did Right:

When the school initially lost a student, the school did a great job of informing students, parents and the community of what was going on without oversharing personal details that the family would not want. The presence of grief counselors was strong and immediate. The school did a wonderful job of showing that they really cared for their faculty, staff and students well being during a tragic time. I also thought it showed a great deal of character when I heard they were making personal visits to her family on their own time just to check in on them. Allowing the memorial items was also very commendable. I’ve seen it happen too often where administrators get swept up in policy and procedure and they forget to be human sometime.

What They Did Wrong:

While I still believe the administration did not mean to upset the students by removing the items, now that I have an understanding of crisis communication plans, I see why this was an issue. They did not do any sort of communication up front about plans of the removal. Most crisis situations are unexpected, but this situation could have been contained a lot. Sure, there probably still would have been upsets students, but if they knew the time was coming it would not have been so jarring.

What They Have Done to Improve:

In the past six years since then, they have really beefed up their social media presence. In the last two years they have hired someone whose sole purpose is to manage and monitor their Facebook page. She can see if there are posts from angry parents about late buses and is able to get feedback to the appropriate school in a very timely manner. Ideally that parent would just contact the school, but since that is not how our world works, we need organizations to monitor their social media. She also works directly with someone in public relations. Anytime a major event or a press release needs to go out, she is able to get it out in seconds before rumors start swirling.