A crisis or unexpected event can disrupt your normal business operations and have an actual or perceived negative impact on your company. Handled well, and it can keep an unfortunate situation from becoming a full-blown crisis. Handled poorly, and it can ruin your firm’s reputation for years.

Before you are faced with a crisis, a crisis communications plan is one of the most critical tools you can have in your toolkit. Such a plan helps establish a uniform communications system, procedures, and protocols to help your company deal effectively with emergency situations and minimize adverse consequences.

Central to your firm’s response to any crisis is a Crisis Response Team (CRT). You may call it something different, but as the name implies, this is a small group of employees with the authority and experience to marshal the firm’s resources to respond to and recover from a crisis. It can include people such as but not limited to:

If a crisis requires you to respond to media inquiries, one of the most helpful tools you can have is a series of “holding statements.” These are short fill-in-the-blank statements, much like Mad Libs of days gone by. Since you may have to offer updates or statements without knowing all the facts, it’s helpful to have general holding statements with blanks to fill in for the specifics of the particular situation.

As your response to a crisis starts to unfold, you’ll need to assess how severe the crisis truly is, as different crises require different response levels.

Since a Level 1 crisis can be handled internally, let’s focus on your response to Levels 2 and 3.

• All calls from the media should be referred to the CRT
• Only the CRT is to speak to the press
• Prepare and distribute an initial response to the media and employees
• Keep a log of all incoming media inquiries. This log helps ensure that you reaspond to each one
• Monitor for social media activity and other coverage of the crisis

A unique aspect of the A/E/C industries is that much, if not all, of our firms’ work is at client-owned or -operated sites. This means that, in most cases, your firm will need to defer to the client when it comes to responding to media inquiries. Be aware that the press will often reach out to whomever they can find, including other project team members, for comment. Should this happen, notify your CRT so they can coordinate with the client – and do not offer any information to the media without client approval.

Should, however, it be your firm’s responsibility to respond to media inquiries, here are a few rules to follow.

Probably the single biggest misconception about responding to the media is that simply saying “No comment” will absolve you from having to divulge difficult information. On the contrary, while it may seem an easy way out, the optics are that you are hiding something. It offers another opportunity for the media to look elsewhere for the information. If they can’t get it from you, they’ll get it from someplace else, and you may not like what is printed. Our recommendations?

After the situation is under control, gather your CRT and evaluate your response to the crisis. Ask yourselves what worked and what didn’t, and adjust your crisis communications plan accordingly.