121112 ALR Crisis Communications PR Workshop Script for Tonya Taylor's Wheaton Class

SLIDE 6 - NEGATIVE PUBICITY (Impact)

NEGATIVE PUBICITY (Impact)

The same factors that account for the potential of the power of positive publicity also operate to make it a formidable force in its negative form.

· However, negative information has potentially greater influence on the customer when it is presented as adverse publicity.

· And, because negative publicity is dominated by non-marketers, it generally enjoys higher credibility than market-dominated messages.

· However, the potential for damage by negative publicity is a function of the seriousness of the problem.

SLIDE 6 – CRISIS (Definition)

CRISIS (Definition)

According to Webster, a crisis is:

A turning point for better or worse;

a decisive moment; a crucial time;

accentuation that has reached a critical phase.

Webster’s Dictionary

· Contrary to popular belief, a crisis doesn’t necessarily have to be bad, it is merely characterized by a degree of risk and uncertainty.

· With proper planning, there can be a positive side to a crisis. The Chinese symbol for crisis, “Wei-ji” is a combination of two words, meaning danger and opportunity.

Crisis communication concerns the second reality in any emergency -- what people think has happened, or what they perceive.

There is an old PR axiom that says, “It’s not that people don’t know so much, but they know so much that ain’t so.”

Crisis management is the art of removing much of the risk and uncertainty to allow an organization to have more control over its destiny, by reducing the number of unknowns and conditioning appropriate behavior.

In determining an organization’s response to a crisis, it is important to assess its position relative to the problem. Is it a responder? A cause? A victim? Does it share the blame or success in handling problems with anyone else?

We are not talking about manufacturing an image. Rather, we are talking about projecting an identity -- which already exists due to known credibility factors -- for both the product in question and the organization responsible for it.

Response to every crisis involves a delineation of duties and responsibilities at key levels:

Level 1 - Policy Making

Level 2 - Design of a Strategy/Overall Command by a Crisis Management Team

Level 3 - Control of the Emergency Public Relations Response

Taking positive action and communicating effectively requires skillful news management, not censorship.

An organization in crisis needs to avoid escalation and polarization, and rather seek accommodation with the press. The occurrence of this crisis is a springboard for positive coverage for said organization.

This morning we spoke about a recent development in the area of crisis public relations is a results-oriented management function called Reputation Management.

This discipline seeks to leverage corporate reputation as an asset, enlisting important stakeholder groups -- including employees, donors and media -- to assist an organization in the achievement of its strategic design and to seek to minimize the resistance of those groups to legitimate management objectives.

An effective public relations plan demonstrates that an organization’s self-interests are the same as those of its various audiences, and that the organization has kept faith with those self-interests.

The effectiveness of such a campaign is not measured by pounds of press clippings, but rather the extent to which the organization is able to influence public opinion and perception of the issues and elements involved.

Through such a campaign, an organization can meet its communications objectives relative to the specific problem and their own identity, corporately, in the following areas:

· Reduce uncertainty

· Facilitate quick response and recovery

· Minimize exposure, vulnerability

· Improve morale among internal publics

· Educate the media

· Protect the ministry/organization image, credibility and operating relationships

· Establish a sympathetic audience by neutralizing enemies, strengthening existing alliances and creating new alliances with neutral publics

· Redirect interests in support of the organziation’s concerns

Another PR axiom dictates that bad news doesn’t go away and does not get better if it is ignored.

Rather, bad news often gets worse over time and stories grow bigger when reporters have to dig them out.

The process of crisis communication deals with impressions and perceptions, not facts. Actually, perception is made up of emotion plus facts. Together they move people.

Public relations does not create false images, rather it emphasizes positive, true images. PR can focus attention away from the negative aspects of an issue to focus on the positive, equally true aspects of an issue about which an organization is better able to communicate.

According to the industry journal PR Reporter, a positive attitude instead of a siege mentality is critical to success.

The job of crisis PR is not to make the public believe that bad is good. Rather, it attempts to make a solid public perception into a gray issue.

Crisis PR is not a proper and above board Yale debate. Rather, it is gorilla warfare in the jungle of public opinion.

Most news publications -- whether Christian or secular, newspaper or magazine -- are fundamentally a business, not a public service organization.

Reporters might try to portray themselves as surrogates of the public good, but the primary purpose of a media organization is to make money by packaging news to build readership or viewership. Media often have a vested interest in catastrophic issues because they make news.

Information spreads from media to media, and a sharing of news information is almost inevitable. This is particularly true in our current Internet age, where any article written becomes part of a permanent database which can fuel stories for years to come.

Internal communication is vital during a period of crisis. When employee morale is up, an organization can better deal with the crisis, as employee attitudes and dispositions influence other key audiences.

Employees are, in effect, the most important publics because their continued support is needed to maintain ongoing sales and ministry.

Each employee is an unofficial spokesperson for the organization, exerting considerable influence among attitudes of other publics. Telling the troops the news before they read it or hear about it will in effect cause it to become old news by the time it appears in additional press reports.

Facts are the foundation of good communication, but a single statement of facts will not carry the day. Rather, simple accurate messages need to be reinforced over and over through appropriate publicity, promotion and advertising vehicles.

When a product or service is under attack, an organization can’t use the benefit of that product or service to mankind or a specific niche group to defend itself. It is important that an organization take the initiative, and not be forced into a reactive position. Getting in front of a potentially damaging story is the best way to manage it.

At the early stages of the crisis, more important than what a spokesperson says is what he or she demonstrates -- a concern for the issue and the people involved. In so doing, representative spokespersons can never counter-attack a writer or a medium, only counter-attack misinformation