Crisis Prevention

Hello everyone!

Welcome to our second week of learning about all things Crisis Communication! In our first blog post we discussed and defined crisis communications. If you haven’t checked out that blog post, make sure to read it first to get a full grasp of the topic before moving further.

This week we will be taking a deeper look into the first step of crisis communications: Crisis Prevention.

Crisis prevention is the process of being proactive and trying to avoid a crisis.

Most companies are either completely unprepared or seriously underprepared for a crisis. Many managers claim they are in denial that such reputation-destroying crisis’ could ever happen to their company. “The failure of organizations to anticipate and prevent potential crises is a rampant crisis of its own” states expert Jonathan Bernstein.

Timothy Coombs, the author of Ongoing Crisis Communication: Planning, Managing, Managing, and Responding, addresses all about this topic in his book. The book talks about there being different steps in the process to help prevent and reduce threats. Coombs states what he thinks is smart to abide by is the five-step crisis process, “identifying the sources to scan, collecting the information, analyzing the information, taking preventative action if warranted, and evaluating the effectiveness of threat reduction”.

Currently management companies are now trying to think of advancing by using the tool environmental scanning. Depending on the company, they watch the environment for different changes, trends, events and other emerging social and political issues. By tracking the trends, one is able to use it as information to use as a guide to plot future actions.

All in all, it is better for a company to spend a tiny fraction on prevention costs rather than the huge cost typically incurred when being inadequately prepared. With deliberate preparation and planning, one can stay calm in the potential of an actual disaster.

#crisiscommunication #crisismanagement #crisisprevention