Being an owner of a business, one must always be prepared to handle any kind of unpredictable circumstances which is known as a “Business Crisis”. This can happen at any point in time and mostly it comes surprisingly and affects the reputation of the business very badly if not handled at right time. A business crisis can happen in many ways, for example, a PR data breach (exposure of some confidential information to some unauthorized person), scandals, marketing strategy failures, damage caused by negative reviews, etc. These are all the Public Relation crisis and can be handled with a crisis communication plan. When a business is hit by a PR crisis, a well-executed crisis communication plan helps in protecting the brand’s reputation from any kind of serious damage. 

In the world of the internet, social media is the fastest mode of communication these days, and it takes less than a second to ruin the reputation of a brand on social media. If your services or brand receives negative comments on social media, disgrace, etc. it will not take time for the people to lose trust in your brand which may badly affect its reputation. The professionals of the leading PR agency are trained to handle such situations professionally.  

Firstly, it is important to identify what type of situation is considered to be a crisis and how it is different from a normal situation. Here are some situations that can be considered crises:

• If the reputation of the brand is getting affected.
• If the workflow of the company is getting affected.
• If potential customers are getting affected.

Let us check out some fundamentals of a crisis communication plan.

In every business, it is a good practice to keep everything documented so that it can be understood by other people when you are not in the company. The documents should contain every small detail of the critical issues and the related information about them. While making a full-proof crisis communication plan, PR professionals must add these important elements to the document. 

1. A well-planned document must be prepared to contain key points:

• Why this plan is prepared and what is the purpose behind making this?
• When is the right time and criteria to activate this plan?
• What are important communication tools that need to be used while executing the plan?
• Name of the person responsible for the execution of the plan.

1. While processing a crisis communication plan, various things are executed simultaneously like collecting necessary information, creating documents from it, distributing the necessary information to the media, etc. and this cannot be achieved by a single person. Hence, every company must have a dedicated team of skilled professionals who are capable of handling the issues efficiently. 
2. Every member has some dedicated work to be done according to his/her professional skills hence, the work is distributed among them accordingly. To handle media calls, the team must have a spokesperson who is efficient enough to handle the situation wisely. 
3. Before spreading the information in the outside world, always give preference to the internal staff and keep them informed about the plan.