This is a CRUNCH 'small bite' - a quick tip for our followers and fans.

When a crisis hits, the first hour can make or break your reputation.

In this episode, Heather Claycomb and Natalie Swart walk through what leaders and comms people must do in those first 60 minutes. They talk about how to pull your crisis team together fast, get clear on who is doing what, and stop people working at cross purposes.

HMC director Heather Claycomb and HMC senior account manager Natalie Swart share practical tips for gathering solid facts, sorting truth from rumour, and deciding who needs to hear from you first. They explain why staff and key stakeholders should usually be at the front of the queue, and when you need to go public early versus when you can keep things contained.

You will also hear how to shape simple, honest key messages that cover what you know, what you do not know yet, and what you are doing next. The goal is to keep control of the story before social media does it for you.

Key takeaways

• In the first hour, get your crisis team together and give everyone clear roles.
• Collect only confirmed facts. Do not base your response on guesswork or gossip.
• Work out your key audiences, starting with your staff and closest stakeholders.
• Decide if you need to communicate publicly yet, based on the scale and visibility of the issue.
• Write short, clear key messages that state what has happened, what you are doing and what is still unknown.
• Move early to set the story. If you stay silent, others will fill the gap for you.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• HMC

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Here we go.

Hi everybody, I'm Heather and this is Natalie.

And today we're going to talk to you about when a crisis hits.

What are five things you need to do in the first hour?

And the first one's kind of logical is activate your crisis team.

So get everybody in the same room that is working on that crisis that you need.

So it's definitely going to be your CEO, some key senior leaders, your comms person, but it might also be sort of your legal representative, maybe hr.

And if it's a really big crisis, it even might even be your chair or other board members.

So yeah, activating that crisis team first.

And I think assigning roles right from the outset, really important.

Everyone knows who's responsible for what, where everyone's remit start and end.

Yeah, for sure.

Everybody knows.

Yeah.

Who's in charge of what.

So that's the first thing.

Activate your crisis team.

The second thing is basically gathering the facts.

You really need to do that fast, but you need to do that accurately and that can sometimes be a challenge.

So I guess for, especially for the comms person, if you're the comms person, it's a, the facts, what do you know, what don't you know and what's the organization doing to find out the rest of the facts.

And I guess you're eventually here going to be doing some sort of communications out to your key audiences.

So you need to stick to what is verified information only.

So that's a key thing to do in that first hour.

I think every time the crisis team meets as a whole, being clear at the end of that meeting, every single time, what action points, what happens thereafter.

Because I think sometimes a lot of those meetings everyone gets caught up in the about the pressing issue at hand.

But what actually happens as a result, sometimes that's left very unclear or muddily about who's doing what.

So really like wrapping it up tightly at the end of each of one of those crisis meetings.

Yeah.

Cause I think the thing about a crisis obviously is you're all in sort of a stressful situation.

So when you're thinking about what those facts are.

Yeah.

You want to make sure.

Have I heard that right?

I was stressed, I was doing something else.

I was Writing something down.

Did I hear that fact right?

So, yeah, it's important to sort of summarize that the third thing you need to do then is once you know the facts, is figure out who.

So who is your audience?

You need to always start, of course, with your internal audience.

And your staff needs to be the first people you're informing.

Your board, probably some key stakeholders.

And then look around, look outside and say, you know, do our customers need to know yet?

Is it our suppliers?

So really putting together that audience list is the third key thing you need to do.

And fourth then is determining whether you need to be proactive and going public, or is this something that can be contained and you don't actually have to have a public message?

Cause I think when people think about a crisis, they think they automatic.

You need to go to the media and that sort of thing.

But it's not always that way.

But it's not clear, I suppose.

No, it's not black and white.

It would make it a lot easier if it was.

But yeah, it's not black and white.

And every scenario differs.

And say, if your building was burning down, there's a very obvious need there to be very speedy and very proactive in your public facing comms on all the channels you have available.

But every scenario is going to be different.

So just pinning down exactly what approach you need to take from the outset is.

Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be different every time.

Yeah.

Think of a crisis maybe that maybe only affects your supply chain.

You know, the public won't really care.

It's a crisis for you, but that doesn't mean that it's a crisis that the public needs to be informed about.

But I guess the other thing too to think about is you might decide at the start that this is just something that we're going to contain.

For now, the public doesn't need to know, but it might evolve over time.

And then you might think, okay, this is gonna get out, this is gonna be public, and the public needs to know about it.

And you might change your stance.

So number five, the fifth thing you need to do in that first hour when a crisis hits is determine your key messages.

What are you saying?

So remember, you've gathered the facts with your crisis team.

Now you need to put those into some key messages that are simple, stating only the facts and also stating, here's what we don't know as well.

And once you have your key messages, then putting them out in the right channel.

So the people that you need to communicate with, where are they hanging out.

And if it's a public message, it's going to be on social media, it's probably going to be a media release, that sort of thing.

I remember like five years ago I attended a webinar on crisis and this guy that was putting together the webinar, he said that in a crisis situation you need to actually, if it's a public situation, you have to go out to the public within 10 minutes of the crisis happening.

And I was like stunned by that.

And that was five years ago.

So you can imagine it's probably shorter period of time now.

And I know that's a big ask.

It's a big ask for a lot of companies.

It's probably not going to make the 10 minute mark.

But yeah, as you're putting together your key messages, as you're thinking about who to and how to get it out, you need to be doing that really quick, I guess is my key message.

And you always just have to think about how can I make this human?

How can I make it people focused and imbibe it with empathy and transparency and all that good stuff.

But yeah, keeping the people focused at the core, that's really important.

So I guess the key from all those five things that we're talking about today is I guess what we would call controlling the narrative early.

Because if you don't tell your story, it is gonna get out of control and it's gonna happen probably on social media.

That's where crises break these days.

So you need to be just really in control and getting out there as early as you need to.

So just to summarize the five things you need to do in the first hour of a crisis, first of all, activate your crisis team, gather the facts, determine who you need to talk to, confirm if you're going to be having a proactive or reactive strategy in terms of going out publicly or not, and then preparing your key messages and figuring out where to put them.

So, yeah, good luck and if you have a crisis, give us a call.

Thanks for joining us today for Crunch, brought to you by New Zealand PR agency hmc.

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See you next time.