Build a crisis plan before the phone rings

The UK Government Communication Service's crisis communications framework begins with planning and rehearsing before any crisis. The Crisis workflow in The PR Assistant is a four-step guided sequence for doing that. You can run it for a situation unfolding at 6am or as a tabletop exercise on a slow Tuesday, so the steps feel familiar when it counts.

Assess the issue

Before anything is drafted, you work through what happened, who is affected, and what is likely to become public and when. Under pressure it is tempting to skip this and jump to what to say. Writing the assessment first helps keep a statement from being drafted about facts nobody has confirmed.

The assessment includes a severity call. On a test run it returned "Medium, trending toward High," with its reasoning: no regulatory involvement yet and no confirmed safety issue, but a specific, checkable number was circulating in a channel the client does not control. A senior person would make that judgment instinctively. Having it written down gives the whole team the same read on how serious the situation is.

The holding statement

This goes out early, before you have all the facts. A PRSA Job Center checklist places the draft in the first four hours, after you verify what happened, and suggests keeping it to about 100 words. It draws on the client's voice and boilerplate from the client profile, so it avoids the generic corporate non-denial. The same checklist notes that rushed or vague statements often come across as evasive.

Spokesperson prep

Whoever takes calls needs to know what they can say and what they cannot. This step builds talking points and likely questions for the spokesperson on file in the client profile, so you do not scramble to work out who is authorized to speak and who is only senior.

The media response plan

The last step produces an operating document: who handles which outlets, the escalation path if the story grows, and what the follow-up statement says if new facts emerge. A crisis can need more than one statement. Building the follow-up alongside the first response means you are not improvising the second statement while people are still reading the first.

Why run it before you need it

Nobody wants to spend an afternoon planning for a crisis that has not happened. Do it once anyway for any client where being caught flat-footed would be expensive. Pick a plausible scenario, such as a product recall, a data issue, or an executive departure that is about to go public badly. You end up with a holding statement template, a spokesperson brief, and a response plan in the client's voice, so you are not starting from a blank document while a reporter waits on hold.

Doing this work for the first time during a crisis takes longer, and the story runs without your client's side in the meantime. Once the statement is drafted, Writing Review is a quick way to check its wording.

For the statement itself, see how to write a crisis holding statement.