Despite evidence that organisations with a crisis plan recover faster, 46% of businesses still don’t have a crisis plan.

That’s according to global research undertaken last year by Burson Marsteller and Penn Schoen Berland, for its 2011 Crisis Preparedness Study.

The team conducted 826 face to face and online surveys in May and June 2011 with business decision makers – half belonged to small to medium enterprises and half to large enterprises.

59% of those surveyed had experienced a crisis. Controversial company developments were the most common crises encountered at 31%, followed closely by logistics difficulties, danger to product safety and technical accidents.

On average 60% of organisations said the crisis cost them more than $750,000 and resulted in drops in revenue (32%), cut backs and/or layoffs (24%), loss of corporate reputation (18%) and destabilisation of the entire company (18%).

Yet only 54% of those surveyed had a crisis plan.

Does your organisation have a crisis plan? If not, why not? Evidence shows that a plan helps an organisation recover quicker and handle the crisis better.

Crisis planning is an important part of business and includes evaluation of possible scenarios, actions plans for managing the crisis, financial planning in case of a crisis, allocation of roles in a crisis, mock crisis training runs and targeted training for key spokespeople as well as issues monitoring.

Contact me for assistance with your crisis plan. Preparation really does pay off.

Birgit Schonafinger