Preparing for a communications crisis

Crises differ in every particular except one: the response is decided under time pressure by people who are not all available. That is what preparation addresses.

What to prepare

The team. Three to five people, named, with deputies. Someone with authority to decide, someone with the facts, someone who writes, someone who handles the operational response.

The contact routes. Mobile numbers for everyone, including deputies, held somewhere reachable outside the office systems, because the crisis may be a systems failure.

The authority. Who can issue a statement without further approval, and what the limits are. A process requiring four approvals produces a response in twelve hours, which is far too late.

The channels. Where you will publish: your site, which social channels, which distribution to media, and who has the passwords. Access held by one person on holiday is a common and avoidable failure.

A holding statement template. Three sentences: what we know, what we are doing, when we will say more.

The first two hours

1. Establish the facts. What actually happened, confirmed, not reported.
2. Assess who is affected, and whether anyone is at risk. That determines everything else.
3. Acknowledge publicly, even without full information. Silence is read as concealment.
4. Inform internally first, or the workforce learns from the media and speaks to it.
5. Set the next update time, and meet it.

Point four is the one most often missed. Employees are the largest group of unofficial spokespeople you have.

The holding statement

Three components, and nothing else.

What we know, stated plainly and only what is confirmed. What we are doing, concretely. When we will provide more information, with an actual time.

What it must not contain: speculation, blame, minimisation, legal hedging that reads as evasion, or the phrase that everything is being taken seriously without saying what is being done.

Coordinate with legal advice, do not be governed by it

Legal counsel will advise saying as little as possible. That advice minimises litigation risk and maximises reputational damage.

The workable position: never admit liability, never speculate, and do express concern for anyone affected. Expressing regret that something happened is not an admission of fault, and refusing to express it is read as indifference.

After the event

A written review within two weeks: what happened, what the response was, what worked, what did not, what changes.

That document is the actual value of the exercise, and it is the one step almost always skipped once the pressure lifts.

The rehearsal

One two-hour exercise a year with a realistic scenario. It reliably reveals the same things: nobody has the mobile numbers, the approval route is unworkable, and nobody knows who has the social media passwords.

Finding that out in a rehearsal costs two hours. Finding it out during a crisis costs considerably more.