Crisis Communications
If left unmanaged, a crisis could destroy your reputation. In challenging times, we’re to help. The Absolute team can help you prepare, respond to, and recover from a crisis.
Between us, we have decades of experience in managing a crisis. Whether it’s a small issue that needs a quick but delicate resolution or one of those PR nightmares that seems too big to tackle, we can help.
Not only do we offer a reactive service to protect your reputation when a crisis is breaking, we also anticipate a crisis. Our proactive team ensures effective crisis communication plans are in place before a big event hits.
Strategic response planning
To ensure you manage a crisis quickly and efficiently, it is essential that you have a crisis communications plan or policy in place and that all members of staff are familiar with this plan.
We help build clear, actionable crisis plans so that you’re ready to respond as soon as a crisis hits. We will tailor a plan to your business and help you identify:
- A crisis team – key personnel who will be responsible for implementing your plan when a crisis hits. This will include the names and contact details of your leadership and PR team, legal and HR contacts.
- Potential scenarios – it’s important that your plan covers a full risk assessment and predicts possible scenarios so that your team can be on the front foot. We are skilled in identifying these and will ensure we thoroughly understand your business so that we can identify any risks.
- Pre-approved holding statements – we will work with you to draft holding statements and agree response timelines before a crisis hits so that we can respond quickly, ensuring that journalists do not progress their own stories without receiving a statement from your business first.
- A multi-channel strategy – our crisis communications experts will identify the communication channels that need to be utilised in a crisis and how to tailor messages to each channel, and for different audiences. Channels could include your website, social media platforms, email, internal newsletter and press releases. All channels must be considered in a crisis.
Senior counsel and guidance
When a crisis hits, you want to be confident in your team knowing that you have the very best people in place. That’s why your Absolute crisis team will always involve an experienced member of our agency, often an Account Director, with many years’ experience of handling a variety of different scenarios.
Our senior team has decades of experience in strategic planning, reputation management, stakeholder engagement, ethical guidance, regulatory compliance and more, ensuring that your business has all bases covered.
Media relations
In a PR crisis, good communication with the media is vital to ensure minimal damage to your company’s reputation. Press are influential, and news outlets can significantly shape public opinion. Handle the media carelessly and the crisis can quickly spiral out of control and damage your reputation for good.
We are experienced in liaising with UK and international media across a broad range of industries. We manage timely communications with precision, delivering strong, impactful messages to relevant digital and print media outlets to safeguard and strengthen your reputation.
Effective communication with the media requires a team who:
- Have good relationships with journalists
- Understand how the media operate
- Are proactive and react quickly
- Are skilled in time management and can work to deadlines
- Draft statements that encompass the client’s key messages, protect their reputation and reduce further questions and speculation
Team Absolute is skilled in all of the above and on-hand to manage your media relations so that you don’t have to.
Contact our helpful team today to find out more – 01392 680740 info@absoluteprandmarketing.com.
Community engagement
Need to build a positive relationship with the local community or respond to challenges in a productive way? We can support you – from researching key channels to providing supporting materials and statements that ensure clear, effective communications between your organisation and the community.
An effective community engagement plan is key for ensuring the reputation you have worked hard to build does not get tarnished. Absolute PR and Marketing can help with:
- Identifying a multi-channel strategy to ensure effective communication with the public
- Creating engaging, thought-provoking, clear and stand-out materials that capture attention and resonate well with your audience
- Managing public consultation events to ensure they run smoothly and creating the materials for these such as flyers, surveys, information boards and explainer films
- Drafting pre-approved statements to ensure company values and key messages do not get lost during the public engagement process, especially if controversial
We frequently provide our housebuilder and developer clients with this service when they embark on public consultations.
Media training
As skilled communicators, we can equip your spokespeople with the confidence to answer tough questions when under pressure. We provide thorough training to suit your business. This can be on a 1-1 basis or in a group setting – we can adapt to your needs.
It’s vital that your spokesperson has the skills to communicate your company messaging positively and succinctly in interviews, and effectively in a crisis. We’ll help with what you need to communicate and avoid statements getting lost in translation or misinterpreted.
Our media training workshops cover:
- Defining key messaging
- How to avoid jargon and craft digestible messages for all audiences
- Understanding the mindset of a journalist and what they need from you when a story breaks
- Identifying what you need to provide to different types of media eg print, digital and broadcast
- Understanding what not to provide – what is “on the record” and “off the record”
- How to handle difficult questions with confidence
- Verbal communication, body language, interview skills and camera presence
- Scenario planning and practice interviews
Our workshops can be tailored to the needs of the individual or group. We will always be here to support and guide you, enabling you to become a confident communicator, even under pressure.
