Crisis Management: Strategies and Tactics for Effective Communication

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Crisis Management
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Executive Summary
A crisis is a calamity that can befall an organization at any time. Whenever it happens,
the management should never give up, should come up with appropriate strategies to deal with it.
The back always stops with the management because whenever a crisis occurs, the management
gets blamed for it. This happens even if it is the organization or its stakeholders that suffer as a
result of the crisis. In this regard, crisis communication should be employed as one of the
strategies through which the effects of a crisis can be addressed. What should be done in this
case, therefore, is that the organization should institute a crisis communication team to deal with
the matter. For the team to succeed in informing the public and disseminating the right
information, it should use the most appropriate crisis communication strategies and tactics
before, during, and after the actual occurrence of the crisis.

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Introduction
A crisis is an unwanted event that can occur in an organization. A crisis can occur
naturally or as a result of human action. Natural crisis might arise from the natural disasters like
earthquake, flooding, tsunami or hurricane. Man-made crises can be attributed to human factors
like errors, negligence, information theft, or accounting fraud. No matter how stable an
organization might be, research has established that all organizations are vulnerable to a crisis.
Whenever a crisis occurs, the perpetrator can be the organization or someone else. However,
what remains constant is that a crisis negatively impacts on the organization in many ways. The
characteristics of a crisis include abrupt occurrence, lack of information on the possible
occurrence, high pace of occurrence, and negative effects on the organization as a whole or its
stakeholders (Ulmer, Sellnow & Seeger 2017). Communication should be used as a key
component of crisis management because it is what links the organization to its stakeholders and
the general public. In this regard, it should be upon the management of every organization to
have a well-outlined crisis communication plan both at the pre-crisis, during crisis and post-crisis
stages.
The Benefits of Crisis Communication
Crisis communication is essential component of the public relations initiatives. All the
organizations should have a well-outlined crisis communication strategy because it means a lot
to them. The crisis communication should be part of the public relations strategies because it
serves many roles in the organization.
First, it helps in the protection of the reputation of an organization. Whenever a crisis
occurs, it negatively impacts on the image of the organization (Sadri, Hasan, Ukkusuri &