Corporate Communication Project: Crisis Analysis Report

Each student will produce a brief report of approximately three pages that describes a corporate crisis from the past five years. Students will identify a crisis (not including the GM recall the class is using as a case study) and position themselves as part of the affected corporation's PR team in the period immediately following the crisis, depicting it for corporate management. The document should follow the general format for informal reports outlined in The Essentials. It should contain the following sections:

1. Summary of the crisis (the situation and its causes)
2. Discussion of how specific stakeholder groups (customers, employees, investors, partners, etc.) are being affected
3. Characterization of the media's depiction of the crisis
4. Brief recap of the current situation

Sections 1–3 must reference specific sources (newspaper and periodical articles, television reports, YouTube videos, blog posts, Facebook groups/pages, Twitter trends, etc.) to provide evidence for the document's claims. Sources should be identified in the text; a separate bibliography should not be included.

Effective Crisis Analysis Reports will portray the situation succinctly in a comprehensible, professional format suitable for a corporate management readership (including appropriate grammar and mechanics).

These commented student drafts may be useful examples:

• 2017 United passenger removal
• 2015 New England Patriots Deflategate
• 2015 TLC Duggar molestation accusations
• 2015 Volkswagen emissions discrepancies
• 2015 Chipotle food safety issues

Each student will upload his or her Crisis Analysis Report here as an electronic file in a common format (.doc, .docx, .pdf, .rtf, .pages).