Handling Public Relations Effectively: For Organizational Leaders, Boards, and Stakeholders

Today I had the privilege of attending a seminar entitled, “Avoiding the Public Relations Cliff: Lessons Learned from the UVA Board and President Crisis,” hosted by the Virginia Society of Association Executives. The speakers were Susan S. Gaston, president and owner, The Gaston Group and Joel Rubin, APR, founder and president, Rubin Communications Group. Both of these seasoned professionals in the area of public relations (PR) gave us a synopsis of “18 very bad days” in June of 2012 when UVA experienced an unexpected ‘coup’ of University President Teresa Sullivan.

The episode at UVA was presented as a case study and a springboard for discussion on managing crises, understanding the various audiences that follow your organization’s actions, working with and managing the media, and knowing who will be a spokesperson and when and how your organization should conduct interviews or make statements in times of crisis.

To provide just a few of the takeaways from this seminar, the speakers outlined the following steps to take if you find your organization in a PR crisis:

• Be candid and acknowledge the crisis / problem
• Offer an explanation (do not skirt this by “issuing statements,” you may need to answer some hard questions)
• Contrition / verbalization – be honest, and if necessary, contrite about what has happened
• Consultation – consider whether your organization would benefit from either legal or PR expert advice.
• Commitment – demonstrate and verbalize your organization’s commitment to solving the problem or mitigating the crisis.
• Restitution – this goes hand-in-hand with commitment. If an action needs un-doing, or steps need to be taken to remedy the situation, have a plan and execute it.

Another excellent facet of this seminar dealt with board responsibilities, board training, and the characteristics of excellent board leadership. Stay tuned – we’ll follow up with another post on that soon!