“In today’s world, it is not a question of if or whether an organisation will experience a crisis; it is only a matter of what type of crisis will occur, what form it will take, and how and when it will happen.”
Ian I. Mitroff
As Race Day comes closer and closer, things are starting to get more hectic around the office, making sure that the year of planning has not left anything out or not completed perfectly. Race Week mainly consisted of last minute planning and organisation with tasks such as booking a helicopter for event day for the production team, promoting Race Week events and spectator zones on Facebook, final newsletters to Team Captains and participants and final preparation for the press conference.
One of my tasks during Race Week was to create media statements for crises that may happen on Race Day. This included a notification of fatality, an incident if a participant ran the wrong way and protestors against Chevron, as Chevron thought they may arrive at the City Beach Oval and protest at the presentations. The media manager and marketing coordinator explained that at last year’s event there was the unfortunate case of a participant collapsing at the finish line and passing away and a media statement needed to be released to inform the media what had happened and keep information controlled. She then continued to tell me that although it may seem morbid in writing these statements, it was an important detail in the planning of the event as they need to be prepared for everything and anything that could happen on the day and ensure that the organisers were not caught off guard.
Crisis Management has been spoken about right from the start in PR Principles to to PR Corporate and Consultancy. Doing the PR 393 Professional Placement unit can allow you to put all this theory into practice, just like I had to.
A crisis can be defined as an extraordinary event or series of events that adversely affects the integrity of the product; the reputation or financial stability of the organisation; or the health or well-being of employees, the community or the public at large. (Wilcox et al 1995, p. 222)
Potential effects of a crisis can include a loss of reputation, decrease of sales, other financial loss in the terms of compensation and costs of products, management being distracted from regular business operations, loss of employee motivation and new political regulation imposing constraints for business.
However, the way a crisis is dealt with by the organisation can heavily impact the consequences that they are further dealt with. For example, comparing the Queensland floods with the Japanese tsunami is a great way to show good and bad crisis management. Although no one is accountable for a natural disaster, if your risk management is not well prepared for dealing with the potential impact of a natural disaster, then you will be accountable for its consequences.
The Queensland floods was a terrible natural disaster but the way Premier Anna Bligh and her team dealt with it deserves recognition. Anna Bligh always spoke to the public and media, leaving nothing hidden with regular updates and information in regards to how the government and SES were dealing with the situation. She showed concern, consistency, confidence and competence and was not aggressive during and after the floods.
Looking at how the Japanese government dealt with the aftermath of the tsunami and the nuclear plants, it is evident that it was not dealt with as effective as it could have been. Not having a solid speaker until the Secretary took charge, did not allow information to be released as smoothly and the Japanese public felt as if they were alone in the middle of the crisis. There was no confidence, competency or consistency shown.
Although no crisis occurred on Race Day that needed a media statement to be released, there was that ease of having a statement ready and knowing that even organisers would not be caught off guard and would be able to have control over an unfortunate event.
What crisis do you think was handled well or terrible? Have you had to do any crisis planning at your internship?
Thanks,
Steph Sbrocco
3 comments:
Hi Steph
Your internship sounds exciting, seems like your thriving.
Regarding your question on crisis planning. One of the first questions I put to my supervisor at CEDA was if the orgainsation had a crisis communication plan. The WA branch CEDA is part of a national network; everything is developed and approved by headquarters in Melbourne.
During my first week I was told to observe them in their elements and it was fascinating to watch, they constantly on their toes for any setback to happen, tensely coiled to diffuse for a mishap should it occur. Although most of CEDA events revolved around luncheons, dealing with catering and meal requirements was taken very seriously.
In that regard I found CEDA to operate both a reactive and proactive stance to crises. Reactive in that they dealt with issues at the time they occurred and proactive in that they followed strategies already in place for possible issues that arose and followed it up with a focused team briefing, so the next time they were adequately equipped to deal with any problem.
Hey Steph,
Having an event-based operation as your internship would have been an amazing experience and something I, unfortunately, have not had the chance to do.
As a result of that I have never really given a lot of thought to crisis management for events. As you said, crisis management has been a highly discussed area throughout our degree at university, but I rarely remember a time where events were the talking point.
Reading your post, I found it very interesting to see the importance of crisis management from the perspective of an event organiser. And it truly makes a lot of sense, in fact, I feel a little bit silly not having thought of it before. I definately feel like it is an area that should be covered more in lectures during this degree, as there are only so many times we can look at crisis management within businesses like QANTAS and Shell before we start to hear the same thing over and over.
Maybe they can even use the way the City to Surf handled the unfortunate death last year as an example!
I hope you enjoyed your placement!
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