8 Advisor PR Lessons From This Year's Bank Meltdown

2. Ask tough questions.

“Communications, as a function, has to, in their role, take orders at the strategy level but it has to also be willing to ask the really tough questions of the internal stakeholders,” according to Farmer.

“So if the executives are coming up with a plan or a strategy, whatever it is, or they're thinking about what their financial strategy is going to be for the next year or two years or whatever the trajectory might be, communications has an obligation to think about how the marketplace might respond to something like that and ask those questions before the marketplace actually asks them," he explained.

“That's where I feel like a lot of crises begin. When a crisis does unfold, the decision makers, policymakers, the C-suite so to speak, is hearing a lot of these tough questions for the first time. It's not from the people that you want to hear them from. So comms has to be willing to ask those tough questions and kind of hold the executives’ feet to the fire before the rest of the world does the same thing,” he stressed.

This can help shape the strategy and mitigate crises before they become crises, Farmer added.

3. Have an emergency plan ready.

The third lesson is that firms really need to have an “in case of emergency break glass plan” in place before they need it, Farmer said.

“It's actually pretty surprising in my career to see how many organizations that I've had the opportunity to work with don't really think about a crisis until the crisis unfolds,” he pointed out.

“[It’s] a bit of human nature. None of us like to think about the bad things that can happen until we're forced to think about them. And, at that point, especially from an organizational standpoint, in many cases it's too late to think about them because then you're sort of playing off of your back and being on the defensive vs. being on the offensive when there may have really been an opportunity to be more on the offensive,” he explained.

“If a crisis is going to unfold and you can roll out your strategy, if you have your plan in place [you can handle it] in a much more effective and communicative way than if you’re just basically fending off the slings and arrows of the industry or your critics," Farmer noted.

“So that plan should be thought of as a sort of organic, evolving plan and you should be adapting it continuously in the event that you might need it based on the circumstances on the ground," he explained.

4. Make sure everybody is on the same page.

“All the various stakeholders who are involved in a plan should be identified as part of that plan. And then they should all understand when the plan needs to be implemented and how it needs to be implemented,” Farmer said.

“I saw, for example, in the immediate aftermath of Silicon Valley Bank, where some analysts had put together a list of the next top 10 most likely banks who were ripe to fail for the same reasons that Silicon Valley Bank did,” he explained.

“Then, in the subsequent days, I didn't hear anything from any of those 10 named banks —small regional banks, all of them. I didn't hear anything from them. I followed their Twitter. I went to LinkedIn," he said. "None of them were making any effort, that I saw anyway, to either address that aspersion or to account for it or to offer a perspective on it [based] on the fears of their potential stakeholders, their investors and their depositors.”

5. You can never communicate too soon.

“Another part of that strategy, as a communicator … is, in my view and in the crisis that I've helped organizations run through in the crises that I've seen, is I truly believe that you could never communicate too early to your constituents and to your stakeholders,” Farmer said.

“So communicate early, communicate often. The events are always fluid. You want to write in the white space before either your competitors or the critics or the rest of the industry or marketplace are writing in it for you,” he explained.

“Probably one of the pitfalls that organizations succumb to is not communicating because they feel like they don't have the right message in place [or] it may not be a great message to share yet,” he said. “There might be a bit of sort of falling on the sword, so to speak, that I feel like is okay as long as they're hearing from you.”

6. Be honest and transparent.

“Being truthful and transparent [is] critical to helping calm concerns and address the tough aspects of what the crisis might entail,” Farmer explained. “So don't wait until you have the good message, the all positive message in place before you communicate.”

7. Don’t leave any stakeholders out.

“With Silicon Valley Bank, one of the things that was challenging for them was obviously the headlines were about the depositors potentially losing all of their money and all of their investments,” Farmer said.

“But what was really lacking from the early stories was the perspective of the employees at Silicon Valley Bank. And that's something I think oftentimes an organization can overlook is the feeling of their employees.”

Farmer advised: “Make sure that you're communicating externally but also very critical internally. Also, [make] sure that your human capital is kept up to speed. And I would advocate, wherever possible, make sure that they hear things first so they're not reading things in the [news].”

8. Be empathetic.

“Then, just from the human level, following along the impacts that you see to depositors — of people who may be potentially losing their life savings or your employees who may be losing their jobs — is to be human,” according to Farmer.

Therefore, “communicate humanly wherever possible,” he said. “Be empathetic to their feelings and the things that they might be experiencing and, as a spokesperson for the organization or the face of the organization, that you actually hear them on that level and are trying to communicate with them on that level.”