An Issues-Crisis Perspective

This chapter highlights crisis and issues management in PR companies and how practitioners handle crisis within an organisation.

Issues management seeks to identify potential, emerging, or actual trends, concerns, or issues likely to affect an organisation and its key publics (Howell, 2009). It occurs when there is a gap between what the public expects from the organisation and what the organisation gives to the public. It sometimes can arise through public awareness as well. Thus, I think a practitioner's key role is to identify issues that may affect an organisation so that they will be well-prepared when the issue arises. This is because, not many organisations are prepare for and issue or crisis to arise. Thus they have to think and plan ahead. There are 4 main steps to issue management and they are; 1. Identifying the issue 2. Scanning the issue 3. Monitoring the issue 4. Analysing the issue. These steps will help to clear any issues within an organisation.

A crisis is a major occurrence with potentially negative outcomes that affect the organisation as well as its public, products, services and its reputation (Howell, 2009). In my opinion, the most important difference between a crisis and an issue is that a crisis can threaten the existence of an organisation whereas an issue will not do so. Thus, a crisis is in a more larger scale compared to an issue. There are 5 phases for crisis management. They are 1. Detection 2. Preparation, probing, prevention 3. Acute, Containment 4. Chronic, Learning and damage containment 5. Resolution and recovery. These phases will aid in eliminating a crisis.

Issues and crisis and inter-related in the sense that when an issue gets out of hand or control, it becomes a crisis. Thus, in my opinion, practitioners should attack an issue first and bring it under control so that a crisis will not arise. Practitioners should also consider using the media to prevent a crisis or an issue as the media is a prevalent tool and it will be able to reach out to numerous people. If practitioners address all the issues concern with the public through the media (including the web) it will effectively reach out to the public and may eradicate the problem of issue and crisis arising.

In conclusion, I personally feel that issues and crisis are inevitable to an organisation. Thus practitioners and organisation should be well prepared for it as the least they can do is be prepared for these situations and minimise the problem.