Crisis comms playbook: written before the next incident, not during it.
Your VP knows what to say in the first 90 minutes. Written for the person who wakes up to the Slack notification at 7am Sunday, not for the PR consultant you'd have to call. Maps the four to six incident types most likely to hit your specific business and builds a response protocol for each.
Who this is for
Companies with public-facing exposure (SaaS with category visibility, consumer tech, service brands with named executives) and a small enough leadership team that the same one or two people will be making the response calls when an incident hits. If you already have an in-house crisis team and a retained PR firm, you probably don't need this. If you don't, you do.
What's included
- Threat-modeling workshop: identify the four to six incident types most likely to hit your business
- Per-incident response protocol: first 90 minutes, first 24 hours, first week
- Pre-drafted holding statements for each incident type (legal-reviewed if you have counsel; otherwise legal-reviewable)
- Stakeholder communication tree: customers, employees, investors, press
- Channel-specific response patterns (X, Reddit, LinkedIn, email, press)
- Decision-tree flowcharts your VP can read in under two minutes
- One tabletop exercise to pressure-test the playbook
Process and timeline
- Weeks 1 to 2: Threat modeling, historical incident analysis (yours and category peers), stakeholder mapping.
- Weeks 3 to 4: Per-incident protocol writing, holding-statement drafting, channel-specific patterns.
- Week 5: Tabletop exercise, final revisions, handoff and on-call setup if you're retaining ongoing support.
Frequently asked
What kinds of incidents does the playbook cover?
Review-bombing campaigns, viral negative posts on Reddit or X, product outages with reputational fallout, executive misconduct allegations, data breaches, regulator inquiries, and category-level news that drags your brand in. We map the four to six incident types most likely to hit your specific business, then build a response protocol for each.
Who is the playbook actually written for?
Your VP-level decision-maker: the person who wakes up to a Slack notification at 7am Sunday and has to decide what to say, who to call, and what not to do in the first 90 minutes. The playbook is written so they can read the relevant section in under two minutes and act.
Do you stay on retainer for active crisis support?
Yes, if the engagement is structured that way. Many clients run the playbook engagement as a standalone deliverable and only call me back when an actual incident hits. Others retain me for monthly check-ins and on-call response. Both work, but the on-call retainer is the standard for clients with public-facing exposure.
Build the playbook before you need it.