2. Table of Contents
What is a crisis event? 3-4
Purpose of your research 5
Search terms to use to find a crisis event 6
Apply two frameworks in your search 7-8
Gather excerpts from these types of sources 9-10
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3. What is a crisis event?
A crisis event is an unexpected or unplanned situation that leads to
accusations of wrongdoing against a business or organization.
The crisis event you choose for this project needs to meet the
following threshold requirements, so that you will be able to analyze
communication surrounding it.
1. Find an event or action (something that happened) that led to a
serious crisis for a business or organization.
2. To determine if it was or is perhaps an ongoing serious crisis,
look for something that generated considerable attention in
popular media and that was not handled well by the business
or organization.
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4. Examples
Here are a just a few examples of a
crisis event facing a business or
organization that would work for this
project:
• an environmental disaster
• malicious, unethical, and/or illegal
behavior by employees,
• ignoring problems with a product,
• falsifying data,
• hiring improprieties,
• racial or sexual discriminatory
attitudes that were tolerated in the
workplace.
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5. Purpose of your research.
After you have chosen a crisis event, you will need conduct research
to gather, organize, and analyze the communication surrounding the
event as it unfolded over time.
The purpose of your research will be to write a white paper (type of
report) for an audience of public relations professionals that
presents the findings from your research.
The goal will be to explain the nature of the communication that was
generated by the crisis, how it affected the business or organization,
and how ineffectively the business or organization responded to it. In
addition, you will be coding some of the data you collect (more about
coding later in this slidedoc).
Because this focus is a rhetorical analysis, your sources, of any
type, will be considered primary source material.
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6. Search terms to use to find a crisis event.
Each year, many websites compile a list of the worst or crisis
communication events. So, one way to find an event is to use
search terms such as:
"crisis communication failures”
"Public Relations failures"
"crisis in Public Relations"
Then add qualifiers like “Top Ten”, “Worst,” or Biggest, and consider
adding a “year.”
Example: Top ten crisis communication failures.
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7. Apply two frameworks in your search.
A framework is the method you will use to gather
source data and organize it.
• One frame you will need is chronological
because a crisis event unfolds over time.
• The other frame you will need is a scholarly
approach. To decide that frame, go to the
scholarly articles in bblearn, skim these, and
choose one as a model.
• For example: Varma uses a three part approach
to study a crisis communication event. So, if you
used this approach, you would look for these
phases as your work chronologically with sources
responding to the event.
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8. Consider how a crisis can spread.
As you conduct this phase of research, consider how a crisis can
spread to affect more than one business or organization or person.
Here are two examples:
• Food Network star Paula Deen's crisis event led to a cancelation
of her popular cooking show and the loss of jobs and millions of
dollars for her business Paula Deen Enterprises, Inc.
• When the video of NFL Running Back Ray Rice hitting his fiancé
and knocking her unconscious in an elevator went viral, it led to
widespread allegations of domestic abuse in the NFL and the
failure of this organization to address this problem.
You want to find a crisis event that is big enough for you to find
plenty of material to analyze.
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9. Gather excerpts from these types of sources.
The business or organization’s responses to the crisis event such as news
releases, media interviews, apology videos etc.
Articles by journalists reporting on the crisis event and the business or
organizations responses in news and magazine websites -- both serious
and tabloids.
Editorial / Opinion responses to the event found in news and magazine
websites, blog posts, and fan or advocacy sites.
Depending on the nature of the crisis event, you may need excerpts from
government responses it at the national and/or state level.
Visual material about the event such as screenshots of tabloid cover
pages, cartoons, photographs of the event (as in an environmental disaster)
etc.
Reader response comments to the above
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10. How many sources?
Depending on the nature of the crisis event, you may not find all
types of these sources, but you want to choose a wide variety that
represents the communication surrounding the crisis event.
Your instructor will give you additional guidance about how much
source material you need throughout the project.
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