Knowing Your Audience Paper and Communication ReleaseEssay Preview: Knowing Your Audience Paper and Communication ReleaseReport this essayKnowing Your Audience Paper and Communication ReleaseTo help with communication work, public relations professionals use the concept, of public, as a way to acknowledge all the different audiences served by an organization. Kotler (1982, p. 47) offers this definition of public: “A distinct group of people and/or organizations that have an actual or potential interest and/or impact on an organization.” As an example, Kotler says; think of a college or university and all the groups that have a stake in the success or failure of an institute of higher education. While there may not be much time to prepare when a crisis does occur, the simplest way to prepare for a news interview is to address the issue using the five Ws–who, what, when, where, why, and sometimes how (Coombs, 2007). Obviously, workers and their families, are the primary audience for the Chilean mine, they are an important group to consider, and there are multiple ways that official information spread to the average worker on a mine. However, stakeholders, management, prospective customers (such as potential copper buyers), trustees, staff, residents of the local community, suppliers, and local government officials also have an interest in a mine but may receive different communications and differing amounts of attention from the administration than a miner. The consideration (based on the foregoing discussion) that is to be remembered is that the families of the 33 workers and the parent company are the most important people that need to be addressed by the person communicating on behalf of the Mine.
The potential needs of the families of the miners include receiving a quick response from a company spokes person. This response should include that details of the incident that occured, the number of casualties and injuries (if any), exact number of people trapped in the mine, what is the company doing about it, current situation, expected time till rescue, progress of rescue efforts, any assistance required by the company (from NGOs and/or Government), contingency plans and various other things.
The relationship between having in place an existing crisis plan and an organizations ability to weather a crisis intact is hard to overstate. A quick look at the headlines gives some examples of what types of crises can occur. Nonprofits have faced the fallout of having a leader exposed as a criminal, or even worse, having been the site for an act of violence to occur. External events, such as a natural disaster or an accident, also merit a crisis response. Since such unexpected events have the ability to damage your organizations good name and quickly change the public perception of you and your colleagues, a crisis without an appropriate organizational response can significantly impact the long-run ability to carry out the work of your organization (Ulmer, Sellnow & Seeger, 2006).
The Problem
These types of crises may not be the only ones. There is an even more problematic set of forces at play. The impact of what happened to organizations in a crisis is far more multifaceted than one may usually appreciate. For example, there is a growing number of research that supports the need for more organizational diversity. However, there is no doubt that those organizations that suffer the most suffering on average need a more diverse team and much more effective leadership to help them take on the challenges they face, as explained below. While the numbers of organizations that experienced these crises may seem like a major accomplishment to the large majority, they can be difficult to track and count. With the growth of government, there are many, many more organizations that will likely experience these types of crises.
One of the ways is to take into account the changing characteristics of leaders and organizations in the event of a non-critical situation. In response to this need, the most common measure of crisis management in the enterprise or as a public employee is to consider a crisis management system that is designed to have sufficient organizational and operational resources for emergency response. However, many organizations are not fully prepared to effectively address this problem.
When the critical crisis situation and its associated organizations need organizational and operating resources to operate efficiently or provide needed assistance, they need to come up with a strategy to organize and plan well. Organizations that lack a successful crisis management system or lack adequate capital are unable to utilize these resources effectively and, failing to do so, will require the organization to undertake an enormous amount of internal political and organizational maneuvering designed to address the emergency and potentially to end up with a disastrous outcome.
The Strategy
This section provides a few common elements that must be considered when considering how an organization is prepared to deal with the impact that a crisis can have on its functioning. It is important to understand that planning is not a means to an end. Rather, it is a means to an end. We provide a framework for the concept of how organizations will take action to mitigate a crisis through the use of effective organizational means. When taking action to address a crisis, the strategy must address a number of concerns, such as (1) the need to have effective contingency plans, (2) the need to have operational resources for emergency response or (3) the inability of non-profits to respond when an imminent crisis comes.
Planning for an Emergency
One of the reasons why so many organizations fail to adopt a crisis preparedness plan is that in doing research to determine which organizations are responding and which organizations are not, they find out that it is almost always necessary to have an effective plan in place based on data, records, and procedures. To begin, a plan can include a large array of metrics such as:
the amount of time involved in a emergency situation
the extent to which organizations are prepared to respond to threats
the duration of the crisis and how they are prepared to deal with it
the nature of organizations where employees and contractors are not present
any number of factors such as the specific threats to which the organizations are responding and, more recently,