1. Before anything happens: the 90-minute pre-mortem
The single highest-leverage hour a small comms team can spend is the one you spend before a crisis exists. Block 90 minutes in a quiet week. Sit with the chief executive, one trustee or board member, and your most senior operations colleague. Ask one question: 'What are the three things that could happen to us that would make the local paper, the trade press and our funders all call on the same day?'
Write the three scenarios down in plain English. For each, draft three sentences of holding language you would be comfortable saying in public on day one. You will not use them verbatim, but the act of having drafted them halves the time to first statement when the real call comes. Most teams who run this exercise discover that two of their three scenarios share the same first paragraph, which becomes the spine of your generic holding statement.
2. The contact card every team needs on the fridge
One A5 card, laminated, on the wall above the comms desk and a copy in every senior team member's wallet. On it: mobile numbers for the CEO, chair, deputy, legal contact, insurer's PR line if you have one, and the two or three journalists you most trust to be straight with you in a fast-moving story.
Add the URL and password for your press room, the login for your social accounts, and the name of the colleague authorised to post out of hours. Crises do not respect office hours, and the worst time to discover that nobody knows the Twitter password is at 9pm on a Saturday with a reporter on deadline.
3. Hour one: stop, write, share
Stop reacting. Don't tweet, don't email, don't pick up the next call until you've done the next two steps. The instinct to be seen responding immediately costs more crises than it saves. Take the dog for a walk if you have to. Ten minutes of clarity is worth two hours of cleanup.
Write the three things you know to be absolutely true. Not what you think, not what you've been told second-hand. Three short sentences of confirmed fact. Then share them with your CEO, your chair and (if you have one) your legal contact before you say any of them in public. Five minutes of alignment now saves a retraction in twelve hours.
4. Hours two to six: one channel, one voice
Pick one channel for updates and point everyone there. Your press room is ideal; a single pinned post on your most-followed social channel works too. Resist the urge to comment in five places at once. The more surfaces you publish on, the more surfaces you have to keep in sync, and the more contradictions a journalist can find.
Every email to a journalist gets the same opening paragraph, the same link, the same named contact. Every member or partner gets the same wording. Inconsistency is what turns a one-day story into a three-day one. Paste from a single source document; never reply from memory.
5. The first public statement: what to include, what to cut
Three short paragraphs is the right length. Paragraph one: acknowledge the situation in plain language, without minimising. Paragraph two: state what you are doing about it, in concrete present-tense actions. Paragraph three: commit to a next update at a specific time, even if the update will be 'we still don't know.'
Cut every sentence that contains the words 'unfortunate', 'regrettable', 'isolated incident' or 'thoughts and prayers' unless they are demonstrably true and necessary. Corporate hedging language is the single biggest reason small organisations sound defensive in their first statement. Plain English reads as confidence; legalese reads as guilt.
6. Brief your members and partners before the press
Anyone who could be doorstepped by a reporter on your behalf — board members, member businesses, frontline staff, partner organisations — gets the same email, in the same wording, at least 30 minutes before the statement goes public. The email contains the statement, two lines of context, and one sentence: 'If a journalist contacts you, please direct them to [name] on [number].'
This single discipline prevents 80% of the secondary stories that grow out of a primary crisis. Most damaging quotes come from well-meaning members who answered a question they were not equipped to answer. Give them an out, and they will gratefully take it.
7. Day two: name a single point of contact
Every journalist gets the same name, the same email and the same direct line. Predictability beats access. A 'no comment, but here's a 4pm update' from a named person is better than three different spokespeople offering three different non-answers.
Brief that person's mobile number, working hours and out-of-hours backup in writing to the whole team. If they go off-shift, the handover happens by email so the next person picks up where they left off. Every inbound query is logged in one shared document with timestamp, outlet, reporter and what was promised in response.
8. The social-media decision tree
Three states only. Green: post the holding statement, then go quiet on unrelated content for at least 48 hours. Amber: pause all scheduled posts, lock comments on the holding statement if they become abusive, do not engage in replies. Red: temporarily archive non-essential channels, and route all enquiries to the press contact.
Decide which state you are in once, at the top of each day, with the CEO. Do not let the decision drift channel by channel based on whoever is closest to the keyboard. The worst social-media crisis errors are made by tired people improvising at 11pm.
9. Day three to five: the slow correction
If the initial coverage got something wrong, correct it once, on the record, in writing, to the original reporter. Don't litigate it in public. Don't subtweet. Most journalists will run the correction without drama if the request is short and verifiable. Lead with the fact, not the grievance.
If a fact is genuinely contested, say what you know, say what you don't, and say when you'll know more. 'We'll have an update by 5pm Tuesday' is a sentence journalists trust. 'We have no further comment' is a sentence they work around, usually by quoting someone who should not have been asked.
10. Looking after the human in the chair
The CEO or chair fronting a crisis is being asked to perform under conditions designed to make humans perform badly. They have not slept. They are being asked the same three questions in twenty different ways. They are getting WhatsApps from trustees who have read one tweet.
Comms manager's quiet job during week one: protect their decision-making bandwidth. Filter the inbox. Hold the non-urgent meetings. Make sure they eat. A senior leader who is rested, briefed and consistent for three days is worth more than one who is everywhere for one day and broken for the next two.
11. Internal comms: keep your own staff ahead of the press
Your team should never learn what their organisation is saying in public by reading it on a news site. A two-paragraph internal note, sent 15 minutes before each public update, with a clear line on what they can and cannot say to friends, family, members and reporters.
Add a sentence on wellbeing: 'If you're finding this week hard, [named person] is available to talk.' Crises corrode internal trust faster than any restructure. The teams that come through them strongest are the ones whose comms function treated their own colleagues as a primary audience, not an afterthought.
12. When to bring in outside help, and when not to
Bring in a crisis comms consultant for one of three reasons: the story is legal-adjacent and you need someone who has done this before, the volume of inbound enquiries has exceeded what one person can answer in a day, or the CEO genuinely needs media training before they go on camera tomorrow. Anything else, you can probably handle in-house if you have a press room and a calm hour.
Do not bring in a consultant to write your statements for you. The voice that lands in a small-organisation crisis is the voice of someone who has been part of the organisation for years. An agency draft, however polished, almost always reads as borrowed armour. Use them as a sounding board, not a ghostwriter.
13. Funders, regulators and the awkward third call
Phone your major funders, regulator and any commercial partners whose name might be dragged into the story, before they hear from anyone else. The call lasts five minutes: 'You may see something in the news today. Here is the statement we are issuing at 4pm. Here is what we know. We will keep you updated. Is there anything you need from us?'
Funders rarely punish organisations for having a bad week. They frequently punish organisations for finding out about it from the BBC. The proactive call is almost always remembered as a sign of maturity, not a confession of weakness.
14. Knowing when the story is over
A crisis news cycle ends when three things have happened: the original outlet has stopped following up, no new outlet has picked the story up for 72 hours, and your inbound press enquiries have returned to baseline volume. Not before. The temptation to declare 'we're through it' on day four is strong and usually wrong.
Resist the urge to mark the end with a triumphant statement. The cleanest way to end a crisis cycle is to go back to publishing your normal content — a member story, a campaign, a board meeting recap — at your normal cadence. Normality, calmly resumed, is the most credible signal that you are back to business.
15. Week two: the quiet post-mortem
One page. What we said, when we said it, what we'd change. Filed for the next time, because there will be a next time. The post-mortem is for you, not the board: keep it candid. The version that goes to the board is one paragraph.
Add three lines about what was already in place that helped (the press room, the templated holding statement, the on-call rota) and three about what didn't. Update the playbook the same week, while the memory is fresh. Six months later the lessons feel obvious; six months later, you will not remember the specifics that matter.
16. Rebuilding trust over the following quarter
Trust is rebuilt through small, boring, repeated proof that nothing is being hidden. For the quarter following any significant crisis, publish slightly more than you normally would: a monthly note from the chief executive, an extra board summary, one additional member story per fortnight. Not crisis-related content; just visible, ordinary work.
Track one private metric: the proportion of inbound member or partner emails that reference the crisis. When that number falls to near zero for two months running, you are out the other side. Until then, assume every public action is being read through the lens of the story, and write accordingly.
More from the desk
Back to all resources →