Crisis Communications: Tell the Truth, and Show Your Humanity

When a tolling agency or any other business is facing a crisis, a bit of common sense and humanity can go a long way.

That was one of the main takeaways when Bruce Hennes and Howard Fencl at Cleveland-based Hennes Communications, delivered a crisis communications training session at IBTTA’s New Media, Communications and Human Resources Workshop last month.

The other enduring message: Bad things happen in any organization, and in any community. So the solution is to be ready, prepared, before the slightest hint of trouble breaks the horizon. The tolling industry prides itself on its high level of preparedness for practical and logistical threats, from multi-vehicle collisions to hurricanes and tornadoes. So Hennes’ wise advice was really about taking a very familiar principle and applying it to agencies’ relationships with the communities they serve.

Five Rules of Crisis Communications (Miss Manners Would Approve)

Hennes opened his presentation with five basic rules of crisis communications that start out with the kind of common sense you would expect from Miss Manners, aka the well-known American advice columnist Judith Martin.

1.     Tell the truth upfront

2.     Tell it first.

3.     Tell it all.

4.     Understand that the media will filter the story.

5.     Recognize that a reporter’s job is not to educate or inform, but to tell a story of honor, dishonour, conflict, triumph, or redemption.

The last two points on Hennes’ list are a basic reality, on both sides of the relationship between reporters and their subjects. But the first three points, were also part of a larger theme of IBTTA’s Cleveland Workshop: from social media to more traditional media contact, it takes respectful, consistent, professional communications to solidify relationships and build a wider community of interest for tolling.

“The greatest uninsured asset of your organization is its reputation,” Hennes stressed, and “the court of public opinion is arguably the most important courtroom that you and your directors will face.”

Showing a Human Face

Crisis communications can win hearts and minds by delivering a clear, consistent message and showing the human face of an organization.

When executives receive bad news, their first instinct is often to consult legal counsel, and the attorney’s first piece of advice is to say nothing. Hennes said that’s a mistake. There’s a difference between expressing regret and accepting liability, and a simple human response to a roadside tragedy can go a long way toward demonstrating that an agency cares deeply about a developing crisis.

The opposite is also true: A stone wall of silence can inflame passions in customers or stakeholders who are just looking for an honest acknowledgement or an apology. If they don’t get it, they may end up building a bigger narrative.

Making the Story Go Away

Letting any breaking incident become a recurring bad news story is a crisis communications failure that can have a long-term impact on a company’s brand. When urgent news is breaking, “more attention is the last thing you want,” Hennes told participants. The purpose of crisis communication is to “make your story better, shorter, and to make your story go away.”

But he cautioned that that only works when there’s substance behind the storyline. Beyond acknowledging and taking responsibility for an emerging situation, it’s essential to demonstrate positive steps to put action behind the words. When an organization responds appropriately and pro-actively to prevent a particular problem from ever happening again, it’s much easier for the communications team to shape the story.

Click here for presentations from IBTTA’s New Media, Communications and Human Resources Workshop, October 18-20, 2015 in Cleveland.