Engl 313 ADA Project 4 Slidedoc 1
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This document provides guidance on choosing and researching a crisis event faced by a business or organization. It defines a crisis event as an unexpected situation that leads to accusations of wrongdoing. Students should find an event that generated considerable media attention and was mishandled. Examples given include environmental disasters, unethical employee behavior, and discriminatory workplace attitudes. Students will analyze communication surrounding the chosen event over time, coding sources. They are advised to apply both a chronological and scholarly framework in their search and gathering of excerpts from sources like organization responses, news articles, editorials, government statements, and visual materials.
Engl 313 ADA Project 4 Slidedoc 1
- 1. How to Choose a Crisis Event
- 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 2
- 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. 3
- 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. 4
- 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. 5
- 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. 6
- 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. 7
- 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. 8
- 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 9
- 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. 10