Fishburn Hedges

16.06.2009

Fiona Thorne, managing director of Fishburn Hedges spoke to Gorkana and discussed her top tips for crisis communications.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in an office late at night and far away from my normal central London stomping grounds, when I started to smell pizza. Suddenly I realised that I was hungry.  I also realised that the accountants working on a complex restructuring with us had found a takeaway that would deliver, and more to the point they had ordered pizzas only for themselves.

This showed me that they understood one of the more important facets of crisis communications: get your logistics right, including where to find a late night pizza.  However, they forgot another: dealing with a crisis is a team effort where every element has to work together to produce the best results.

Fishburn Hedges has being doing crisis communications since the business was launched 18 years ago; indeed, one of our first jobs was advising on the collapse of international bank BCCI. Since then our people have worked on everything from product recalls to rescuing business, from natural disasters to helping when a gaming regulator ran up gambling debts. We've seen the discipline develop from dealing purely with a media crisis to a more rounded service - taking in everything from employee relations to digital monitoring.

The other day we sat down and worked out that we've more than 200 years of what might be called "Emergency Relations" (or ER) experience across the team at Fishburn Hedges. As a result we decided it is time to explain exactly what we think ER is all about and what clients should be expecting when they need communications help. So here are a few top-line thoughts:

* Communication thinking should never happen in a silo - and that is never more true than in emergency relations

* The digital age means that bad news spreads almost instantly, and that something said "in confidence" to staff can end up being broadcast round cyberspace before you have paused for breath. So best-of-breed digital monitoring and rapid response are almost as essential as consistent messaging and understanding of all the audiences and communications channels

* The threat of scorching bad headlines can lead to a focus on the "lines to take" and Q&A for the media, but it is critical that the planning and response are seen in the round.  Employees, customers and stakeholder are all often critical audiences.

* A crisis response is only as good as the people who put it together.  You need to have the ability to draw out a bespoke group of people who have the skills required to provide exactly what that particular problem needs.

* Pulling together the right team is not purely about technical skills; it is also about some of the softer elements.  For example, the perfect strategist may not be the right person to have on the ground overnight at a client's office as events unfold to crunch point.  Every team should combine people in such a way that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

* Success is as likely to lie in the brilliant execution as in the strategic thinking

* Getting the strategic thinking right is a critical part of successful delivery, but it's also essential not to overlook the operational and practical details - from on- and off- line monitoring to where the nearest pizza delivery place is.

Emergency relations is a difficult discipline to get right. That's why you need the best people available at all time, not least because having someone who has the right experience and knowledge enables decisions to be made quickly and confidently, and structures to be created immediately to deliver the right messages to the right people straight away. But also it is important to spread the load so that it isn't always the same people who end up angering their families by working weekends and evenings. After all, there's only so much pizza one person can eat.