Select a small organisation that you know well or have easy access to

Section A

Select a small organisation that you know well or have easy access to. Develop a crisis management plan for this organisation that can cover any type of crisis, using your course materials as a guide. This crisis management plan should be no more than 10-15 pages long but can include appendices in addition to the plan. Appendices should contain supplementary information only, such as lists and forms – any information critical to the plan should be included in the plan.

When it comes to stakeholders, you must:

List the key stakeholder groups, carefully segmenting the groups. For instance, you would NEVER say “the general public”. This group would be broken down into a number of segments (with the general public, you would have literally hundreds, so carefully select the most relevant).

Give one paragraph explanation of each.

Outline the best ways to communicate with them (this is VERY important). Communication methods need to be relevant to the audience. For instance, you would not use a media release for people aged 18-25 who do not read newspapers or watch much TV and you wouldn't deal with older people solely via social media as many won't be on Facebook. If you were dealing with farmers, you would select the local farming newspaper as a key communication channel for this group.

While it is accepted that in-company and key stakeholder lists will be difficult for you to develop, you MUST develop a media contact list that is most relevant to your organisation. This can be undertaken using the Margaret Gee’s online resource, available through the Library databases or by doing a Google search of media in your area. It must include radio, television and newspapers, plus bloggers and specialist freelancers if you can find them.

Section B

Then, referring to the list of crises that you included in your plan, select a particular crisis that figures highest on the impact/probability scale and develop a specific scenario, complete with date and time and what happened, plus the effects that would make this scenario a crisis. It must be a scenario that would be of interest to the media.

You then need to build materials specific to this scenario, consulting your materials on how each of these tools should look:

a profile of three of the most relevant stakeholder groups to this crisis, including the best means of communication with these stakeholders (this does not have to be limited to one means). This profile must detail demographic and psychographics features where relevant. Media for instance, will not have pyschographic factors, but it WILL have readers who are of relvant demographic groups.

a holding statement for the initial impact while you gather information, presented in media release format. Do extra research on what a holding statement should look like. This is a NOT a full media release and should be some words that you can put out before you have much information available.

three to five key messages for those stakeholders that should recur throughout the organisation’s dealing with the crisis. You may find that each stakeholder group needs a tailored set of messages. In some cases you may find that one set will be suitable for all the stakeholder groups. You MUST use the key messages format presented in the materials.

Spelling, typographical errors and grammatical mistakes will not be tolerated as this is a report that ostensibly will be prepared for and presented to a client, with some components for stakeholder consumption.