Published in PR News’
Crisis Management Guidebook 2012
By Deborah A. Deal-Blackwell, APR
In hard economic times, and even when things are good, if your organization requires it, you may find yourself wearing several hats concurrently. A few years back at Angel Flight Southeast
(AFSE), I was hired not just to handle the public relations but to head up the whole organization as well. My job reflected the very definition of multi-tasking.
I had my hands full on a normal day as CEO of a non-profit that coordinated 1,000+ pilots to provide free flights on their privately owned aircraft within a five-state region. Throw in a crisis — or two, and it starts to look like the Allstate Insurance Mayhem guy is planning my day.
Triple Crisis
In a span of two weeks, AFSE was thrown into a national crisis, a lawsuit, and the death of one of our key inspirations. The operational opportunity was assisting in the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina. Overnight, our agency literally was coordinating 30 times the normal number of flights. The corporate crisis we were embroiled in involved a fight over our trademark and the media was anxious to report on it. To top it all off, I had my own personal crisis when Dad finally succumbed to illness he contracted as a pilot during the Vietnam war. Looking back, I believe I did a number of things right and some wrong. Here are some of the things I learned or found to be true during this challenging period.
If you find yourself serving as both the leader and the PR pro, you really can only do so much even if you are a whiz at multi-tasking. So, you MUST be ready so that when anything else out of the ordinary is added both you and the organization can survive and perhaps leverage the crisis for a positive outcome. You must have three things prepared in advance:

A plan
 Your “A” Team ready to go
 A “Crisis Kit” – i.e. The “pig”
The Plan
Your crisis operations policy and your crisis media/PR policy are, of course, two different things. True PR professionals will have in place an SOP – standard operating procedure – for dealing with the media and other parties for maintaining the organization’s reputation. I suggest including a memo that’s ready to go—that can be tailored at the last minute to fit the particular situation. This email will contain your generic crisis PR SOP. Before the storm hits (metaphorically, or literally as was in our case) this “reminder email” should be circulated to everyone involved in the organization that might come in contact with the media. In addition to the email, you need to have a plan for every one of your regular P.R. tools – from what you will put up on the web site during a crisis and who will do it, to how you are going to communicate with your staff.
As the leader of the organization, however, your SOP crisis policy for dealing with operational matters is even more important. You are wearing dual hats remember? If you find you can’t appropriately break your focus from the public relations side of the job, remember this:
Ensuring the operations side of the house runs smoothly is, long-term, what’s going to impact your organization’s reputation more than any press release. Your organizational operations plan should be

as detailed as possible with everything from policies that affect direct operations (how much weight in allowed in each type of plane), to personnel (will people get overtime and will you insist on mandatory breaks).
Your “A” Team
If on a “normal” day you usually handle all the PR yourself in addition to your regular duties, a crisis will prevent that. If you started out your career in PR and then switched to a broader executive position as I did, you will hear that little voice in your head say, “Oh, but it’s a reporter! I must take that call!” No, not really. Something’s gotta give and it can’t be the very leadership tasks that make the organization operate. Just like you must have enough staff to run the core business of your company, you must have a person or persons on standby to help you with the PR if you need it.
And, because they probably don’t have the experience working with the media or other influencers that you do, you need to pick an “A” team in advance that can help when Mayhem comes knocking.
Who can you trust on your staff? On your board of directors? Think carefully here – you may not want the obvious choices. It may be that the older bookkeeper in the corner can remain calm, organized, and keep it together while following your instruction better than the popular board member (with their own agenda), who is not always available anyway.
Again, you want people on this PR team that can, and will, take direction. But, don’t wait to give it to them until the crisis is brewing. Take the time while the business is not as hectic to prepare your “A” team on what you need from them. Naturally, you cannot teach them what you know about media relations and give them the benefit of all your experience overnight. But, you can give them an outline on what you want them to do and what you expect – which may be relatively little, or a lot.
You also need to have identified in advance the staff or board members who could speak to the media for you – and that the media is already likely to call, whether that’s in the best interest of the company or not. Meet with these people at least twice a year, even if it’s just on the phone, to discuss how different subjects should be approached if the media raises them. Don’t assume you will be able to reach these people and coach them right before the media does if a crisis hits. That’s taking an unnecessary risk.
The LEAST your “A” Team can do
Even if you can’t turn over all the PR responsibilities during a crisis to this person or team, you can still make your life easier by prepping them on certain tasks. Some of the things I’ve coached un-experienced staffers and volunteers to do include:

How to answer the phone. Easy you say? Not so fast … Reporters can be abrupt, pushy and talk quickly. Teach your team to slow the media down so your team can get all the pertinent information down correctly. It’s extremely frustrating during a chaotic situation to be handed an incorrect phone number for a producer from NBC.

When to bring you messages, when to just collect them, and when to handle it themselves.
This is probably the most difficult PR decision for any staffer or volunteer helping you during a crisis. Here’s where you really want to place your most calm and levelheaded people and then role-play with them on a regular basis before there’s a crisis.
 How to add information about the crisis to the basic boilerplate “crisis” press release in your
“Crisis Kit” (see below).
For most of us, it’s easier to edit a draft than it is to face a blank

page, especially when you are stressed out. Teach your team to give you a first draft to work from even if you can’t depend upon them for a finished release.
Your Crisis Kit
Like any good scout, you should be prepared – again, in advance. And that means having your
Crisis Kit put together before Mayhem hits the fan. In this computer file put the tools you will need to launch your PR effort with as little work on your part during the crisis. As a corporate leader, you probably won’t have the time to build your PR tools from scratch. You will have other things to do and must use your time wisely.
Think of your Crisis Kit computer file as “the pig” that actor John Malkovich pulls out of his stash of ammunition in the movie RED: Retired Extremely Dangerous . It was a harmless-looking pink, plush toy pig, but inside was a grenade launcher that saved him, Bruce Willis, and Mary-Louise
Parker. Is YOUR pig loaded? (See sidebar “Your Crisis Kit.”)
Putting it all into action
If you have a plan, picked your “A” team, and your Crisis Kit is up to date, you are as ready as you probably can be for a crisis. But, when do you put it all into action? Timing is everything – especially if you are juggling dual roles. Don’t wait until the crisis is blowing the walls in. If you see the skies darkening, bring your staff together and pow wow before it starts to rain.
But, timing is also tricky. You don’t want to alarm a bunch of blabbermouths so contain the forewarning to only your trusted staff. Involve only your department heads or inner circle, and emphasize that you can’t have the organization’s work and mission interrupted any sooner than it needs to be; that it WILL be interrupted, slowed, shelved even, by the folks who live for drama. So, take THAT into account as well. If you know you have staff or volunteers that are drama-mongers and will be in the way, have something planned for them to do AWAY from the center of action.
The politics are different in every organization, so let your board of directors, advisors, and stakeholders know what’s coming and that you have a plan in place and are ready for the forthcoming storm. You will save time if you can do this via one pre-arranged conference call. If you send out emails for this step, you are likely to get hit with a separate phone call from every board member.
Then, when it’s time, the next step is to break out the pig – ah, I mean, the Crisis Kit.
If your Crisis Kit is up-to-date you will be in much better shape to deal with whatever is coming.
A final word when you are in charge of EVERYTHING
I hate to sound like my Mother (or yours), but you cannot run yourself into the ground wearing dual hats. In my 30+ years in PR I’ve seen some otherwise professional people totally lose it due to stress—one had to be rolled away in a wheelchair during the height of her event.
Whatever it takes, make sure you get sufficient sleep, some downtime, and eat right. It may seem obvious, but you have to take care of yourself or you could end up doing more harm than good.
During the “two weeks from hell” I was not getting enough sleep driving the long road home every night so I blew up an air mattress and slept on the floor of my office. It was better than falling asleep at the wheel and I got in more shut eye than I would have otherwise.

Finally: breathe. If you’ve survived your career long enough to get to the leader role in your organization, you must have what it takes to survive. You can handle the duties of CEO and still be a
PR pro!
Your up-to-date “Crisis Kit” (the Pig) should include

A pre-written email that’s ready to go to all members, board members, staff, etc. reminding them of your crisis policy and your crisis media/PR policy and why it’s important everyone comply. You can tailor this email to fit the situation.

Your crisis operations policy – for the organization as a whole

Your crisis media/PR policy – organization PR
 The list of your “A” team members and their contact information

Graphics file: video, logos, and photos that preferably haven’t already been published somewhere
 Updated “Trust List” of who you are going to trust with talking to the media if, and when you can’t do it – this could be only two other people; it could be as many as six.

A pre-written email/phone checklist reminding your “A” team what you want them to do and the information you need so you can call each reporter back. You can edit this to reflect the particular situation when it’s time to use it, but you will be so glad you had something already on file to work from.

A generic press release that a helper can update for you to then edit and quickly release

A plan for what you are going to put on your web site and/or corporate blog, Facebook page,
Twitter, etc.

Your current contact lists of media, stakeholders, and supporters

Chocolate. Lots of chocolate. Store it in a real pink plush pig. It’s much easier to operate than a grenade launcher.
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Deborah Deal-Blackwell, APR is the Washington, D.C.; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and London,
England – based CEO (and public relations director) for the IX Power Foundation that works to bring new clean water and energy technologies to emerging economies and the developing world – www.ixpower.com.