MEDIA HANDLING
Crisis Communications
Learn how your comms team can leverage its media relationships to shape coverage and limit reputational damage during a crisis.
Learn how your comms team can leverage its media relationships to shape coverage and limit reputational damage during a crisis
Learn how to prepare and execute effective strategies for protecting your organisation's reputation at the most difficult times
This full-day and half-day Crisis Communications Course focuses on how to develop and implement strong strategies to safeguard your organisation's reputation during challenging situations and under media scrutiny.
What you'll learn
How can you predict and prepare effective strategies for a crisis? What crises are most likely to affect your organisation? What are the stages of a crisis? Who are the right spokespeople and when and why should they do interviews? How do you balance the priorities of your organisation and your stakeholders with the demands of media outlets? How do you use tone and empathy across your channels to defuse hostility and maintain trust?
All this and more is covered in this Crisis Communications training, to ensure your team understands how the media works in a crisis and how to ensure your organisation's point of view is heard in the most difficult periods in the media spotlight.
Learn from experts
This Crisis Communications course takes place in person at your own offices or at PA Headquarters in Paddington. Remote training via Zoom is also available, if preferred.
The course is led by a broadcast journalist who is also a specialist media trainer with years of experience training spokespeople and comms teams. They'll share their expertise and use presentations, case studies, discussion and practical exercises to build your ability to prepare and plan for a crisis and manage the media during intense scrutiny.
After training, you'll receive full course notes by email and a link from which to download your interview recording.
Who this Crisis Media Handling Masterclass is for
This course is for both spokespeople and teams responsible for liaising with media during and after reputational crises, including press officers and people working in communications, PR, external affairs and public affairs.
You could consider pairing this course with Advanced Media Handling training and our Crisis Media Training for spokespeople.
Course Modules
Crisis Communications Theory
Crisis audit – what are your potential issues?
Stages of a crisis
Managing the media relationship in a crisis
Priorities for limiting reputational damage
The Golden Hour – what to do at the start of a crisis
Prepping spokespeople for crisis interviews
Practical exercises
Your own crisis audit
Draft holding and full statement
Analyse media interview case studies
Brainstorm responses to tricky questions
Use tone and empathy in crisis messaging
Record a TV crisis interview (optional)
What our students say
The training scenarios are as real to life as you could possibly get. They took considerable time to research our current plans and issues and used these to design a series of true to life radio and TV interviews. The team is outstanding, and their expertise and knowledge has been invaluable. Book them – you’ll be glad you did.
The lifelike interview settings and tasks that PA Media Training deal in replicate perfectly the real-world feel of a tough media interview and help the delegates come out of the day feeling much more confident that they can play an active role in representing their organisation.
The small class sizes nurture a comfortable environment where everyone supports and learns from each other. The staff helped me hone in on my writing skills and develop the confidence to feel comfortable on camera.
PA Media Training were efficient, well organised and genuinely lovely people to deal with and, importantly for us, able to provide flexibility around our needs to create the bespoke training we required. I wouldn’t hesitate to use them for further training or to recommend them to other organisations.
The team is flexible, slick, well-resourced and overall simply first class. Their expertise and knowledge have been invaluable. I was delighted with our choice, so I’d have no hesitation in recommending them
What a great session we had on Communicating with Impact. Bridgid shared practical techniques to enhance and develop our communications skills so we can present and speak publicly or to senior stakeholders with confidence and impact. I speak for my whole team in highly recommending Bridgid Nzekwu if you are after effective and fun communication training.
Interested in this course?
Talk to the Press Association Academy team about dates, fees and bespoke options.