Eight Tips For Dealing with a PR Disaster in Your Child Care Business

One of the problems that most child care business owners fear is a public relations nightmare. Sadly, this can happen to almost any child care business owner. You never know when a comment will go viral – and worse, when it will be misunderstood somehow. If you ever find yourself dealing with a PR disaster in your community or online, you’ll want to try to implement these tips.

Don’t Ignore the Situation

You cannot avoid bad situations. If something harms your business or your reputation, you must confront it. Even if it’s true and you’re embarrassed, you can often overcome the problem by being open and honest and working to fix it. Your goal is to get ahead of the story.

Don’t Think That Your Reputation Will Save You

Even if, up until now, your childcare business has enjoyed a spotless reputation, a crisis or PR disaster can overshadow your reputation – even if it’s false. The only way to fix someone’s erroneous perception is to tackle it head-on and address the situation with communication.

Don’t Wait until the Situation Has Exploded to Deal With It

If you already know something might come out to the public that you don’t want to, don’t wait. It’s not going to help anyone. Do what you can to mitigate any situation before it explodes. If you didn’t know about it and it’s false, you still don’t want to let it keep brewing and worsening without your response.

Be Sincere and Honest

If you or one of your employees did something wrong in some way (even if you didn’t realize it consciously), once the public finds out, it’s time to come clean. Your response should be sincere and honest and include measures/steps you have taken to prevent a similar situation in the future.

Don’t Avoid Communication with Parents and Staff

Remember that things that happen in your child care business can impact many people – from your business partner to your children and your family members, to your employees, contractors, customers, and possibly investors, and, of course, parents and the children enrolled in your business. Every one of them needs to have communication from you regarding the issue in terms that they will understand best.

Document Everything

When something happens, if you document it, you can often avoid it happening again. Sometimes, a communication breakdown is responsible for the nightmare or lack of training. Other times, it’s a matter of not having clear policies and procedures in place. Whatever it is, if you analyze what happened, you can identify the problems and avoid them next time.

Plan for a Crisis

Take some time to consider the various issues that you can face in your child care business operations. Make a list of possibilities so that you can plan for any crisis that might happen. For instance, a child is left unattended on the playground alone for a few minutes. How will you respond? What are the licensing and reporting requirements? How will you communicate what happened to others? Having a plan in place to address things that can happen will also help you to identify and put in place a primary and secondary plan to hopefully prevent it from happening.

Don’t Act in a Defensive Manner

When faced with a PR disaster, try not to behave defensively. If you’ve done nothing wrong, explain yourself with confidence. If you or a staff member have made a mistake, admit it openly and honestly without being angry.

If you really want to avoid dealing with PR disasters, the best way is to create a plan for yourself or your public persona to answer questions in a way that your audience responds positively to while always being honest. Practice how you will communicate and how you will answer questions. Then, should something happen, practicing your response and communication will help you remain calm and handle the situation more professionally.

Remember, if something goes wrong, accept responsibility for what happened and provide assurance that steps have been taken to prevent similar events in the future.