How can Kenyan universities manage and respond to crises?

A crisis is any event that can cause serious harm to the people, reputation, or financial conditions of an organization. Are you finding it laborious to manage a crisis that is affecting your organization/institution? Are you struggling to figure out what strategies to use while responding to a crisis? How can universities manage and respond to crises? From my readings around issues and crisis management, below are my two cents about how to go about crisis management for an organization.

Over the years, public relations scholars and professionals have agreed that for organizations, crises may occur in different forms: Immediate which through their very nature, an entity may have little or no warning about their occurrence. Such crises may include natural disasters such as earthquakes. Emerging crises are events that can be predicted and, therefore, minimized at early stages (if handled properly). Sustained crises are events that are considered as the most dangerous of all because they can linger on and continually drain the organization of its reputational assets. Eventually, spontaneous crises are events resulting from unplanned activities such as protests or a serious accident. Past incidents in some of Kenya’s prestigious universities have proved that no institution of higher learning is immune to crises or emergencies that could threaten its reputation.

Here are some tips for preparing for and managing a crisis:

1. Be prompt by addressing the public immediately for, some scholars have observed that every crisis has a window in which its negative impact can be lessened;
2. Maintain honesty while addressing the public regarding the issue even if the truth will damage the institution’s reputation because the public may be willing to forgive when the information provided by the company is honest;
3. Be informative because if no information is provided regarding the crisis then the media and the public may create uninformed information about it;
4. Be concerned by showing the public that you care about the victims of the crisis.

There are several ways that Kenyan brands and institutions of higher learning, in this case, can adopt to respond to a crisis.

1. Attacking the accuser to attack the accuser’s credibility.
2. Denial: This is another strategy that you can use to claim that no crisis exists.
3. Justification: The brand can also use justification, a technique that is mainly stating that no serious damages happened as a result of a crisis or that the victim was at fault.
4. Ingratiation: This can be employed by the institution while attempting to appease the publics through means such as giving away coupons.
5. Corrective action: This strategy requires the institution to right the wrongs or to correct the problem. This action can take the form of restoring the state of affairs existing before the crisis, and/or promising to prevent the recurrence of the offensive act. You can also consider being apologetic for the mistakes that you might have made. Some public relations scholars refer to this technique as mortification. An organization can also evade responsibility by either claiming its act was merely a response to another offensive act, and that the behavior can be seen as a reasonable reaction to that provocation or claiming a lack of information about or control over important elements of the situation. You can also evade responsibility by making it clear to the relevant publics that the act in question happened accidentally.