Practice

Crisis communications

crisis comms · issues management

Definition

Crisis communications is the work of speaking when the story can harm the organization: safety, crime, outage, lawsuit, executive misconduct. The first product is a holding statement that is true. The second is a cadence of updates. The third is the after-action that puts a canonical postmortem where reporters and models can find it.

Speed without accuracy is a second crisis. Accuracy without speed cedes the first hour to whoever will talk.

How it works

Confirm facts. Speak what you know, name what you do not, say when you will update. One spokesperson. One newsroom thread. Lawyers in the room, not in the last sentence of every line. Do not newsjack your own disaster.

Worked example

A two-hour payments outage: 12-minute holding statement on status and newsroom (“we are investigating, card-present still up, next update in 30 minutes”), then timed notes, then a postmortem URL. Reporters and Perplexity use the postmortem for a week. A “no comment” leaves them with Twitter screenshots.

How it differs

A holding statement is the first public line. Media training is prep. Reactive PR is answering inbound on ordinary news. Crisis is when you are the news.

Common errors

Lying to buy time. Joking on social. Briefing different facts to different desks. Deleting the status page when the outage ends.

Sources