Brief: As a rapidly growing senior homecare delivery provider, when Mahdi Kazemzadeh became the Director of Care and Continuous Improvements Officer at the Home Instead Farnborough, Farnham and Fleet offices, having acquired the franchise, he wanted to ensure that he could promote the business in an appropriate and structured way. More importantly he wanted to ensure that a rigorous plan was in place for proactively managing any adverse publicity in a professional and controlled way.

Solution:  A detailed plan was developed by Blackchilli, covering not only potential solutions to address whatever the problem was, but also included a detailed plan to help manage staff, stakeholders, peer, the local community, local authorities and media interaction.

The Communications Toolbox includes all key contact information, detailed messaging, examples of possible incidents that can be rapidly adapted to meet the exact requirements of the ‘crisis’ at the time. The plan also includes contingencies for operating the business from an alternative location, pulls together various materials that would potentially be needed (everything from photographs, signage and hi-vis vests down to a complete stationary pack). Hopefully everything you could need to manage a crisis – all held at a single location.

Results: Mahdi comments: “When a crisis hits, many organisations are totally unprepared to deal with the attention they receive. They don’t have the messages or materials ready to deal with the issue or the media attention it creates. They are simply overwhelmed by the events of the moment.  With our ‘Communications Toolbox’ we can go to the file and pull out a plan that contains everything we need from a single location to manage all aspect of the problem and hopefully minimise the impact on our reputation and brand.”