You’re a practice manager working a typical shift when a team member walks into your office to say a newspaper reporter is in the lobby and is working on a story about pet health care. What do you do? What happens if a TV station calls to ask about the cost of veterinary care? What’s the best course of action if a disgruntled pet owner goes on social media to slam your clinic over an alleged mistake?
Those are hypothetical situations, but they happen, sometimes thrusting the unprepared into the unwanted limelight.
Many practice owners and managers don’t think they need a public relations strategy, but they will wish for one when they find themselves in crisis mode. Experts say a poorly handled media query or hastily-dealt-with PR crisis can have a long-lasting negative impact.
A crisis PR plan can be the difference between success and failure when dealing with the media and unwanted or undeserved public attention, said Dr. Jim Humphries, an adjunct professor at Texas A&M University. He has become a specialist in crisis PR in recent years, dedicating time to research how veterinarians and practices can be better prepared.
Most practices never find themselves in a crisis PR situation — and many never have to handle a simple media inquiry — so they don’t think they need to be prepared. That attitude is prevalent and leaves practices scrambling when a potentially embarrassing situation pops up.
“That is a problem when you are flying blind and don’t think you’re going to have a crisis,” Dr. Humphries said. “An awful lot of veterinarians go through their whole career without having what you would consider a true media crisis, and that’s as it should be. But we live in a very sensationalistic media time, so unfortunately, when veterinary medicine gets the spotlight, it’s about something bad more frequently than not. A crisis needs to be managed properly. If it isn’t, it can turn into a mess.”
Ready or Not
Preparation isn’t complex or time-consuming, but it requires forethought, such as determining who will do what when the media calls and who will serve as the designated spokesperson during interviews.
Dr. Humphries advises creating message points for those who might field media calls, including what a receptionist will tell reporters. Additionally, message points can help a spokesperson stay on point and tackle challenging questions.
Dr. Humphries suggests drafting roughly 10 points that end on a positive note or bridge to a positive one.
“You want to be forthright and compassionate in your manner,” he said. “The media needs to feel like you are telling the truth and giving the facts. You never just leave it hanging there; you want to always bridge to something positive.”
Two statements he offered as examples include:
- “We’ve corrected it in this way, but the good news is it doesn’t happen very often.”
- “The good news is, we were able to correct it quickly.”
Veterinary practices should have a plan for when a reporter with video equipment or a camera crew visits.
“You don’t want to let them just wander through the hospital with a camera crew, because you don’t know what they’re going to videotape, and you don’t know what room they might turn into,” Dr. Humphries said.
He advises identifying B-roll locations, such as shots of pets in kennels or from inside the pharmacy.
Social Media Fallout
The sort of incident or inquiry that puts a clinic into the undesirable public spotlight is difficult to predict. It could be a poorly handled media inquiry or an emergency room death that sends the pet’s owner to a local TV station. It could be an incident in which a practice did no wrong but still found itself in the public eye.
Laurie Monteforte, the founder of Strong Mountain Media in Pennsylvania, has handled crisis PR incidents for clients in various industries. About two years ago, she helped a veterinary clinic wrongly accused of animal abuse by an angry pet owner who took to social media with accusations that the practice made the dog’s condition worse.
“It snowballed to the point where people created a Facebook group specifically just to hate the veterinary practice,” Monteforte said.
A state investigation cleared the Pennsylvania clinic of wrongdoing but didn’t stop some people from spreading misinformation and ill-will about the practice. People took to the Facebook page with comments like, “Do not go there. They’ll kill your pet,” she said.
Before they contacted Monteforte’s PR firm, the practice’s managers planned to post a statement on the clinic’s Facebook page and considered going to the media with their side of the story. Monteforte steered them away from both ideas.
“I told them, ‘We’re not going to make a public statement because this Facebook page is not the whole world,’” she said.
Her strategy was to sidestep the social media negativity and avoid possibly bringing the matter to the attention of people who might not have known about it.
“It’s a small group of very angry people, and they’re very isolated,” she said. “We let them be.”
She also asked the clinic to tell clients who were aware of the Facebook page to suppress the urge to comment in defense of the clinic. “All that looks like is you’ve asked your friends and family to comment,” Monteforte said.
Instead, her firm worked to build good PR by publicizing free vaccine clinics, and the clinic went on social media to announce new hires and other positive changes.
“You need to be building goodwill in the public all the time,” she said.
Stories Live On
Being unprepared or handling a media interview poorly can have a long-lasting negative impact. That is a key warning in a journal article, The Anatomy of a Crisis and the Veterinarian’s Role, published by the American Association of Bovine Practitioners.
“In our experience, these crises last around three days,” the article stated. “It’s going to be very hot for at least three days, and a story can live on in the news for a year.”
The paper advised assigning responsibilities for monitoring the media to a designated staff member and ensuring continual communication with employees and clients.
Having ready-made responses for all potential situations is impossible, but the article suggested being prepared to answer:
- What happened.
- Where it happened.
- When it happened.
- Why it happened.
- How it happened.
- What you are doing about it.
- How you are keeping animals safe.
Once a situation occurs, other critical responses might include:
- Acknowledging the problem.
- Taking responsibility.
- Outlining the steps you are taking.
- Showing commitment to the patient’s well-being.
- Demonstrating your determination to move beyond the situation.
“Having a crisis plan in place with the details figured out in advance will help you focus on doing what is most important first because you are following a plan you already have laid out,” the article stated.
Correct Information Matters
Gathering and disseminating the latest and most accurate information possible was how Trupanion handled the public information fallout during COVID-19, said Dr. Steve Weinrauch, the pet health insurer’s chief product officer. When COVID began to make news but had yet to be declared a pandemic, Trupanion policyholders began dialing the company’s call center with numerous questions.
“People were calling in concerned and asking our team members, ‘Hey, what should I do? Should I drop my pet off at a shelter? Are other pets going to spray whatever this mystery virus is to me or my pet? Should I go into the vet? Should I not go into the vet?’” Dr. Weinrauch said.
To get better information to customers and handle the influx of queries, he and his team began reaching out to other organizations, such as universities, partner veterinarians, shelters and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That move enabled Trupanion to amass and share the latest information on the pandemic and avoid becoming embroiled in a crisis due to a lack of information.
Dr. Weinrauch said veterinary clinics can do something similar by keeping clients well-informed and building a list of contacts who can provide more information.
“It was the first step in managing that crisis,” he said. “The first problem that needed to be solved was misinformation and concern amongst all our constituents in the ecosystem.”
PR PLANNING GOES A LONG WAY
The best practice in a public relations crisis is to be ready for an unfortunate event. Deciding what to do if a crisis unfolds and who will say what shouldn’t be done hastily, according to a journal article published by the American Association of Bovine Practitioners at bit.ly/45y7n8j.
The paper suggested that managers answer the following questions:
- What do you consider a public relations crisis?
- Under what circumstances will you implement your plan?
- Who will be in charge in a PR crisis?
- Who will be on your response team?
- Who will be responsible for what, such as notifying clients, informing employees, answering the phone and monitoring the media?
- Which spokesperson will handle media calls?
- Have we developed the proper messaging?
PRIME-TIME BLUNDER
A LinkedIn article posted at bit.ly/4b2NqaI identified “The Slap,” delivered upon Chris Rock by Will Smith at the Academy Awards, as one of the biggest PR debacles of 2022. “While everyone was losing their minds over the situation,” PR expert Carla Williams Johnson wrote, “my thoughts were, ‘Where’s Will’s publicist?????’ To make matters worse, he won Best Actor and was allowed to accept and give an acceptance speech.”