Vindicat and their Public Relation Management

(picture by Sikkom)

Like Arnout Maas described in his blogpost ‘Does Vindicat suck at public relations? Yes and no’, the student association Vindicat in Groningen has been the target of a lot of criticism and scandals the past couple of weeks. First of all, a banga-list was published where female students were ranked based on their performance in bed. After that, news about a student who ended up in the hospital with brain injury, which was caused during the hazing, came out. And finally last week, a first-year student went missing after a night of heavy drinking and was found death in a canal in the centre of Groningen. 

At least Respond

(picture by Topsy.fr)

In his blog, Maas states that the student association could have avoided negative coverage by just responding to the news coverage in the media. This point of view is shared by 
Veil, Beuhner and Palenchar (2011), they state that responding to the public can minimize the rumours and protect reputations. Responding to a crisis is important but in my opinion, in this case, with a crisis that keeps building up (three events in three weeks) for crisis communication to be effective, the response should also at least be appropriate to the situation. I think just responding to these crises will not be effective enough to save the organization’s reputation. 

Crisis Response Strategies

(picture by bernsteincrisismanagement.com)

There are a couple of different crisis response strategies that can be effective in the case of reputation damage. According to Coombs (2015) four reputation repair strategies can be distinguished: 

• Denial, severe any connection between the organization and the crisis with the objective to establish no responsibility. 
• Reducing offensiveness, acknowledge an organization bears some responsibility but there was little control over the situation or the crisis was not as bad as people perceived. 
• Bolstering, add positive information to the crisis situation. 
• Redress, actions designed to prioritize victim concerns, offer compensation, rewards or apologies to the victims, ask for forgiveness. 

(picture by Dagblad van het Noorden)

Which strategy an organization should choose depends on their level of crisis responsibility. In the case of Vindicat, the responsibility to the crisis was medium to strong. It is therefore recommended to instruct and adjust published information and offer an apology and/or compensation to the victims (Coombs, 2015). Apology and compensation are not the only effective response strategies for reputation restoration. People also react positively on responses containing sympathy (Coombs & Holladay, 2008). This is one of the things Vindicat did do a couple of days ago, but this was only after the third crisis happened. 

Do you think it would have saved Vindicat a lot of damage and crisis when they would have responded appropriately on the first two crises as well? 



About the Autor
Y. Mathot is an individual blogger who is living in Amsterdam, finishing her masters in Persuasive communication at the University of Amsterdam, being passionate about PR and Marketing.