Penn PR or Lack There Of

Penn State clearly dropped the ball when it came to crisis management with the news of the sexual abuse scandal flooding every possible medium.  I am sure the university was aware of the charges for Sandusky were going to be considered the court well before it became breaking new to the public, yet they still had no solid contingency plan.  As I remember from my undergraduate public relations studies, when dealing with crisis management is important to try to get some kind of response out within an hour of the news being released to the public.  Even when the perjury charges for Tim Curley and Gary Schultz were floating around the Penn State communications team remained silent.  Despite being aware of what was going on there was clearly no preparation, of which they had plenty of time to do.  Their lack of action leads me to believe that there was an assumption of Paterno's status it would eventually just go away despite the innocent victims involved.  

It seemed that the only plan of action on the communications side was to avoid the media all together.  There was no response to any of the allegations,  Joe Paterno canceled his weekly news conference 30 minutes before it was scheduled to begin.  The public quickly became uneasy about this and and began expressing themselves what the University should have been doing.  Their silence was loud and unappreciated by fans, viewers, and alumni.  When there is no response from an organization in a situation like this its easy for the public to begin to alter their feelings or ideas towards it.  If they are not being reaffirmed by apologies or notified of improvements in policy or procedure then the image of the organization can become tainted very quickly.

There are 5 important steps to handling crisis management which include, research, assessment, chain of command, notification, and control.  Penn State dropped the ball in all of the areas.  Knowing these charges were going to come out to the public there should have been a "crisis team" that was constructed and dedicated to policing the scandal as it unfolded.  The team should have assessed all of the possible situations that could have potentially happened in order to prepare at least a spokes person to address the public. There also needed to be a clear chain of command to report to and obtain information from.  Taking these simple steps could have cut some of the backlash that university has dealt with due to their loud silence throughout the situation.