Here’s what happened
At 9.30am on Sunday 6 August, 2017, a hammer head crane being installed on our lead contractor Probuild’s construction site at Discovery Point, in Sydney’s Wolli Creek, fell onto an adjacent residential building.
Emergency services were on-site and in control by 9.45am and 485 apartments across four buildings were evacuated. You can imagine the scene: hundreds of distressed, confused and angry residents streaming out of their homes onto the park in their pyjamas, often without pets, wallets or phones.
The contractor, emergency services and our development team set about securing the site, assessing the stability of the crane and making plans for its safe removal; that’s an extraordinary story for another day.
A separate team focused on logistics and – crucially – communication.
It quickly became clear that hundreds of people would have nowhere to sleep that night.
In this rapidly unfolding crisis Frasers Property’s team was in the best position to manage the human side of the incident; we’re deeply invested in the Discovery Point community, with property management and building management relationships in place, an established sales centre to act as a hub and skilled staff to mobilise, so we stepped into a role that might otherwise have been taken by the contractor or emergency services. But by taking the reins, we introduced the perception that we were responsible for the incident.
Regardless, by mid-afternoon, we had secured 150 hotel rooms and by early evening the affected residents were on buses to their hotels. We helped organise for residents’ pets – including a chicken – to stay with friends.
We managed accommodation for over 100 people for these eight days. Families, the elderly, nursing mothers, home-based workers. While most residents were able to return home on Sunday evening, all four buildings lost access to their car park for eight days.
In addition to arranging accommodation and reimbursements of out of pocket expenses, Frasers Property established a fully-equipped community centre and converted a display apartment into a parent/baby zone to provide daytime respite for affected residents for the duration.
Communications response
We established a crucial ‘single source of truth’ – our GM Residential NSW, Nigel Edgar – who largely worked from site for the duration, collating updates and passing them on to our two-person Comms team, which was responsible for all internal and external comms.
Photos began appearing on social media within eight minutes of the crane falling.
We started listening to social and mainstream media, using Meltwater and iSentia, and by 3pm on Sunday afternoon we had posted our first message on social media. In hindsight, that’s a few hours later than we should have reacted.
We realised most of the public conversations were happening on Facebook, so this became our primary social media channel, posting simultaneously on Discovery Point’s official page and a community-managed neighbourhood page.
But while Facebook was a fast way to reach lots of people, it wasn’t the preferred channel for all affected residents, so we took a multi-channel approach: on-site staff managed phone, email and walk-in enquiries for up to 12 hours a day, and we extended our contact centre hours into the late evening.
As soon as we made ourselves present on social media, we exposed ourselves to criticism. People were understandably angry, frustrated and distressed. Not every comment was rational, and it wasn’t easy to manage, but our responsibility to our customers doesn’t finish when we hand over the keys.
Local residents stepped in, sharing our posts and adding offers of help; we saw the tribe rise up in the best possible way.
The high-profile incident on the high-profile site attracted lots of media attention, and journos used our Facebook updates for information and posted queries – opportunistically and successfully – to contact affected residents.
For eight days the Comms team consolidated and disseminated updates – with thrice daily Facebook posts, twice daily emails, plus replies to hundreds of comments and private messages – including:
- Opportunities to return home to recover pets and possessions
- An urgent callout for car keys so that the fireys could relocate vehicles in the car park
- Updates on crane removal works: scheduling, noise, night works, site safety
- And an every-changing update on when homes and vehicles would finally be accessible
After eight days the crane had been safely removed and residents of the affected building returned to their homes. Time for a deep breath, and a de-brief.
Here’s what I learned
1 | Take a multi-channel approach
When you have an urgent need to contact hundreds of people directly affected by a crisis, you have to take a multi-channel approach. While Facebook was by far the fastest way to disseminate information to thousands of people, you can’t be seduced by its delicious reach and immediacy: we also used phone calls, SMS, email and letterbox drops to ensure we reached people on their preferred comms channel.
2 | Compile a contact database
We started building a contact database of affected people on the Sunday afternoon, compiling information collected by Police, and from property managers, building management and from affected residents. On reflection we should have called in more troops and started this task even sooner because that database was the engine behind our entire client communications strategy.
3 | Respond with generosity and compassion
One of the daily challenges was dealing with residents’ demands for certainty: ‘When exactly can I get my car back?’ In a highly fluid situation we simply couldn’t provide certainty, which put us in the firing line.
We came to realise that the only appropriate response was a deep breath and compassion, and to respond that we were providing the most accurate information available at any time and that all reasonable expenses associated with this incident would be reimbursed – so go ahead and hire a car for the week. Generosity was an appropriate reaction to this deeply distressing and disruptive event, and it was a sensible risk management strategy.
4 | Choose your conversations carefully
Facebook allowed us solve problems very quickly before they escalated, and being seen to be addressing problems quickly and publicly built trust in Frasers Property.
Social media amplified our messages, like ‘word of mouth’ on steroids. Our posts very quickly became the authoritative source shared within and beyond these communities. If someone asked a question, it was highly likely that another community member would reply by linking to our posts.
But our role was to be an accurate source of information, not to engage in peripheral conversations. Conversations circulated around tenants’ rights, compensation, construction hours and the responsible entity. We stayed focused and chose not to engage in these conversations.
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An interview with Property Australia on this incident and Frasers Property’s response was published in September 2017.
