Crisis Communication Scenario

Crisis Communications Scenario

You work as a Communications Manager for the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the trade group that represents the country's wind energy industry. An article appears in the Journal of Raptor Research that reports on the results of a study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The study found that wind energy facilities have killed at least 85 golden and bald eagles between 1997 and 2012 - and that eagle fatalities possibly may be much higher. The study also indicated that eagle deaths have increased dramatically in recent years as the nation has turned increasingly to wind farms as a source of renewable, low-pollution energy, with nearly 80 percent of the fatalities occurring between 2008 and 2012 alone.

Your Executive Director (ED) asks you to prepare the Association's response to the questions and requests for comment that are certainly going to be pouring in as the results of the study start to gain public awareness. You need to get up to speed quickly on the topic of bird mortality due to wind energy facilities. Let's look at how you would prepare to respond to this "crisis".

Source: Kathleen A. Hansen and Nora Paul, https://open.lib.umn.edu/infostrategies/chapter/16-7-crisis-communications-scenario/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

PR: Clarify Message Task

Your discussion with the Executive Director would include seeking the answers to these questions:

• Does the ED want to issue a statement to the media on behalf of the AWEA?
• If yes, should that be in the form of a news release, a news conference, a streaming web conference, something else?
• Does the ED want to consider posting something on the AWEA's website as part of the response?
• If yes, you need to determine "best practices" for how to do this effectively.
• Does the ED want to provide "talking points" to the industry members of the AWEA so they know how to respond if they get questions? How should those "talking points" be distributed most effectively?
• Similarly, should the AWEA communicate with other stakeholders with an interest in the work of the AWEA? What form would that take?

PR: Identify Audience

Once you clarify the types of messages and the communications strategy your ED wants you to pursue, you need to determine the audiences who will be targeted. This leads to another set of questions:

• Which media outlets should we target with our news releases/news conference/web conference messages? Are we trying to reach media organizations that produce news and information for the general public or for specialist audiences? Who are those specialist audiences?
• What will our industry members need to have in the "talking points" material we create for them? We need to anticipate their information needs since our mission is to help association members be effective advocates for the wind power industry as well as succeed in their individual business endeavors.
• Who are the other stakeholders we might target with our response? Our partner organizations and associations at the state and national level? Regulators at the state and national level who govern our industry? Bird enthusiasts who oppose wind turbines? Environmentalists who care about both renewable energy AND wildlife protection? Researchers inside and outside the government who study bird mortality and wind power?
• Once we know which stakeholder audiences we want to address, how can we best reach them with our messages?

PR: Narrow Focus / Brainstorm Ideas

Based on your discussions with the ED, you start to brainstorm some of the ways you might address the message task. Again, you identify some questions that can help you focus on the right angle.

• Aside from this one study, what do we know about bird mortality caused by wind energy facilities and who has studied the issue?
• What else kills birds and how does that compare with avian deaths from wind turbines?
• What are our member industries doing right now, if anything, to reduce bird mortality?
• How does energy production using other methods affect wildlife and how does that compare with wind energy production?
• What regulations are in place that our industry members must follow to protect birds? How are we doing with compliance?

PR: Locate Information from Sources

Here is just a tiny sample of the information contributors you could tap and the information they might provide to help you focus your messages.

Public-sector Institutions

The Department of the Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wind Energy Guidelines provide detailed specifications for the way wind energy facilities must operate, including ways to reduce bird and other animal mortality. You might suggest posting a link to these guidelines on the AWEA's website and include some narrative about the ways your members are complying with the regulations. You might also include this document and some of the data about compliance to your association members as part of their "talking points" material. This document could also be shared as part of a news conference or in any statement your ED might issue to the media.

Private-sector Institutions

The National Academy of Sciences, a widely-respected, private-sector, non-profit organization, conducted a study about other causes of bird mortality in addition to those caused by the wind power industry. It appears from this study that bird mortality from other causes is much greater than bird deaths from wind power facilities. You might, once again, consider posting a link to this study on the AWEA's website, compose some narrative that summarizes the findings of the study and make sure any public statements or "talking points" include the results. At the same time, you need to be sure that you don't minimize the concern for bird mortality rates caused by wind power.

The National Wind Coordinating Collaborative is a private-sector, non-profit organization with partners from the wind industry, science and environmental organizations, and wildlife management agencies. They did a study of wind-wildlife interactions that summarized a huge amount of scientific and scholarly data and produced a fact sheet that outlines how the wind power industry and environmentalists are responding to the issue. This document would clearly be part of your information package.

Scholarly Sources

Conducting a search in Google Scholar using the search statement "bird mortality from wind energy" uncovers hundreds of scholarly studies done in the U.S. and around the world. The general consensus appears to say that there is a clear link between wind turbines and bird mortality, but there are lots of caveats in the findings.

One article in the scholarly journal Biological Conservation shows that bird mortality is greater with a type of wind turbine that is being phased out (lattice vs. monopole); that taller monopole turbines may pose more risk of raptor bird mortality than shorter monopole turbines because raptors fly at a higher elevation than song birds (the usual victims of wind turbines), but that the blades on taller monopole turbines turn at a slower rate than the blades on shorter turbines so those risks may offset one another. Again, the data from studies such as this one would need to be summarized and included in any messages you generate.

Journalistic Sources

A search for journalistic coverage of this issue turns up thousands of news stories, including recent reports about offshore wind farms that pose fewer risks to birds than land-based turbines. Many news stories have been written about opposition to wind farms because of concerns about wildlife mortality, and there is state and local-level opposition as well as national-level concern. At the same time, editorials supporting wind energy as an alternative to the more harmful effects of other types of energy production have appeared in a number of newspapers in communities where the issue is of particular concern. This might suggest a list of news organizations you would want to target for your news releases since you know they have written about the issue and are open to a nuanced approach to the problem. You could also create a Google Alert on the topic so you would be notified whenever a new news story appears.

Informal Sources

You would want to monitor social media chatter about the most recent raptor mortality/wind power study and pay attention to those individuals and groups who seem to be most influential or have the largest followings. You could create a set of alerts on the most popular social media sites to be notified whenever there are new postings. You could then decide whether or not to respond based on the type of information in the postings or the likely impact of the messages. Additionally, you might suggest that the AWEA reach out to the most vocal individual opponents of wind energy (you would be able to generate a list of their names from the news stories you found) and incorporate their perspectives and concerns into your responses where appropriate.

PR: Synthesize the Information

The information you locate from a variety of contributors appears to show that there is definitely a problem with bird mortality and wind energy. At the same time, the wind power industry, private-sector institutions, public-sector institutions and scholars are working on ways to lessen the impact. Also, the potential danger to animal life from wind-power appears to pale in comparison to the danger posed to ALL life from other forms of energy generation (climate change due to rising CO2 levels, strip coal mining, fracking, oil pipeline construction through wildlife habitat, deep water oil drilling, etc.).

You would want to be sure that your message strategy does not minimize the harm to birds, but also points out the efforts being taken by the industry to address the problems with newer technologies, additional precautions, changes in turbine sitings (offshore rather than on land), compliance with existing and emerging regulations and related initiatives.

The message strategy you might propose to your Executive Director would include recommendations to include these types of arguments, with plenty of links and references to the information and evidence you have located, in any public comments, website content, news releases, "talking points" documents, and related messages to address the immediate "crisis" and to address longer-term communication needs for the association.