Marketing
Build a crisis playbook
The kit a comms lead needs before the thing happens.
Fill it in
What you do and what could plausibly go wrong.
Which to prepare for.
One per scenario, ready to send.
Your prompt
Build a crisis playbook. Scenarios: breach, outage. [the company] The playbook exists because judgement is what disappears first. Write who decides, who speaks, who must be told and in what order, before any wording. Most crises go badly in the first two hours, and that is an organisational failure rather than a writing one. Write the holding statements now: what is known, what is not, what you are doing, and when you will say more. The temptation in the moment is to say more than you know, and the correction is always worse than the delay. Include who must NOT speak, and what happens if a journalist calls someone directly. Prepare the internal message too. Staff hear it from the press otherwise, and then they become the leak.
Use Build a crisis playbookOpens with everything above already filled in.
Why this works
Crises go badly in the first two hours, and that is an organisational failure rather than a writing one. This decides who speaks and in what order before anything happens.