A product failure, workplace accident, senior employee misconduct or a social media post that suddenly takes on a life of its own. A crisis can take many forms, and you rarely get to choose when one happens. What you can control is how prepared you are to communicate when it does.
In September 2026, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and Institute of Directors (IoD) published a new handbook for boards covering the crucial role of communications before, during and after a crisis. The guide looks at the whole crisis communication lifecycle – from predicting and preparing for potential issues through to responding, recovering and building resilience.
It is a comprehensive and useful resource, and one I would encourage business leaders to read. But it is also a lot for any business to take on board. Understanding best practice is one thing; translating it into a practical crisis communication plan that reflects your organisation, its risks, people and stakeholders is another.
At PRG, we have supported clients through crisis situations and helped businesses prepare for them. I have also undertaken specialist training in crisis communications, covering everything from identifying a crisis and developing a plan to communicating effectively with different stakeholders.
It might sound obvious, but if there is one lesson I would take from my experience, it is the importance of preparedness: the best time to decide how you are going to communicate in a crisis is long before you find yourself in one.
What is crisis communication planning
Put simply, crisis communication planning is the process of working out how your organisation will communicate if something happens that could seriously disrupt the business or damage its reputation.
A crisis communication plan defines the responsibilities and procedures for communicating with internal and external stakeholders when a significant business disruption or reputational threat occurs.
It forms part of wider crisis management. Operational teams may be dealing with the incident itself – fixing a technical failure or managing a safety incident, for example – while your crisis communications strategy determines what you communicate, to whom, when and through which channels.
Crises come in all shapes and sizes. When I completed my crisis communications training, one of the important lessons was that what constitutes a crisis will differ from one organisation to another.
Potential scenarios might include a product failure, service outage, data breach, regulatory breach, employee misconduct, redundancy programme, accident or natural disaster. A smaller issue can also develop into a crisis if it is allowed to escalate.
At PRG, our own planning work therefore considers different levels of risk rather than assuming every incident requires the same response. And good planning starts by asking: what could realistically happen to our business and who would need to know?
Why crisis communication planning matters
Imagine something serious has happened in your business. The phone is ringing. Someone has posted about it on social media. An important customer wants an explanation. Employees are asking their managers what is happening and a journalist has emailed asking for a comment by 2pm.
- Who responds?
- Who has the authority to approve what you say?
- Who speaks to employees, customers and the media?
- And what happens if your managing director is unavailable?
This is why crisis communication is important and why trying to make all these decisions for the first time in the middle of an incident creates unnecessary risk.
The importance of a crisis communication plan lies in having already thought through many of these questions. You cannot write the exact response to an event that hasn’t happened yet, but you can anticipate potential events and establish the framework that will help you respond.
That preparation gives the people involved a starting point at precisely the moment when time and clear thinking are at a premium.
The business value of being prepared
It is easy to think of crisis communications as something that sits solely with the PR or marketing team. In reality, communications risk management should form part of wider business risk management.
A poorly managed crisis can affect employees, customers, suppliers, investors, regulators and the wider community. Depending on the situation, it can also interrupt normal operations and damage commercial relationships. This makes the value of crisis communication much wider than dealing with the media.
One of the main benefits of crisis communications planning is that it helps the business respond in a more controlled way. People understand their responsibilities, decisions can be escalated appropriately and key audiences can receive information sooner.
The CIPR and IoD’s new handbook makes a similar case at board level, arguing that effective crisis communication is central to good governance and organisational resilience.
Your crisis preparedness plan is effectively insurance you hope you never have to claim on. If something does happen, the work you put into it suddenly becomes extremely valuable.
Protecting reputation and stakeholder trust
Reputation takes years to build and can be damaged remarkably quickly. During a crisis, people want information. If they cannot get it from you, there is a risk they will find it elsewhere – and what they find may be incomplete, inaccurate or based on speculation.
That does not mean rushing out a statement before you understand what has happened. Effective crisis reputation management relies on balancing speed with accuracy.
Silence, conflicting information from different departments or an overly defensive response can all undermine trust. Clear, factual and empathetic communication helps reassure stakeholders that the organisation understands what is happening and is taking the situation seriously.
Protecting brand reputation also means recognising that different stakeholders will have different concerns. Employees may want to know whether they are safe or how their jobs are affected. Customers will want to know what it means for them. Regulators may require specific information. Journalists will be looking for facts and answers.
Good corporate reputation management starts by understanding the different audiences before the pressure is on.
Making better communications decisions under pressure
One of the most useful things you can establish in advance is who has the authority to make decisions. Your crisis communications framework should identify a core crisis team and establish clear responsibilities:
- Who leads the response?
- Who gathers and verifies information?
- Who drafts communications?
- Who approves them?
- Who acts as spokesperson?
You also need to consider deputies. A crisis response plan that relies on one person being available at all times has an obvious weakness.
In crisis plans we have developed for clients, we have divided responsibilities between a first-line team, a wider response team and specific communications roles. These can include preparing key messages and holding statements, employee and customer communications, spokesperson preparation, social media response, media communications and monitoring.
The exact structure will depend on the size and complexity of your organisation. What matters is that everyone understands their role.
Responding to emerging situations quickly without sacrificing accuracy
Speed matters when communicating during a crisis but being first is of little value if the information you put out is wrong. This is where a holding statement can be invaluable.
A holding statement is a short initial response that acknowledges what has happened and provides the facts you can confirm while giving your team time to investigate further. It might include when and where an incident occurred, what is known, what the organisation is doing and when further information will be provided.
What it shouldn’t include is equally important: unconfirmed information, speculation, unsubstantiated rumours, blame or details about individuals that should not be made public.
You can prepare templates for likely scenarios as part of an effective crisis communications strategy. They will still need adapting to the circumstances, but starting with an agreed framework can save valuable time.
The same applies to customer emails, employee FAQs, website notices and social media statements. Preparing the foundations in advance allows you to concentrate on the facts of the actual situation.
Keeping crisis communications clear and consistent
During a fast-moving situation, new information can arrive by the minute. One department hears one thing, another hears something slightly different, while somebody else has seen an update on social media. That is how inconsistent messages begin.
One of the most useful crisis communication best practices is to create a single source of truth.
A simple crisis factsheet can record what happened, when it happened, who is involved or affected, what is currently being done and, importantly, which information has been confirmed and which remains unknown. In our own planning work, we also record the source, date and time against confirmed information. That gives everyone involved in the crisis communication process an agreed factual base from which to work.
Consistency does not mean sending exactly the same message to everyone. An employee email will naturally look different from a media statement or customer update. The core facts and messages, however, should align.
Internal communication is particularly important here. Your employees should not be finding out what their employer is saying from the media or a LinkedIn post.
Knowing who needs to hear from you
Stakeholder mapping should be an important part of crisis communication planning. Depending on the nature of your organisation and the crisis, your audiences might include:
- employees and their families
- customers
- suppliers and business partners
- investors or shareholders
- regulators and other authorities
- journalists and trade media
- local communities.
Once you know who those groups are, think about what each is likely to need from you and how you will reach them.
An emergency communication plan should therefore include more than a media contact list. Do you have up-to-date employee contact information? Who owns the customer database? Can you publish an urgent message on your website? Who has access to your social media accounts? How will you contact key suppliers?
It is worth asking these questions when nothing is wrong, because finding the answers can be surprisingly difficult when something is.
What should a crisis communication plan include?
There is no universal crisis communication plan template that will work for every organisation. A useful plan should reflect the risks, structure, stakeholders and resources of the business that will actually use it. However, there are some core elements of a crisis communication plan that I would expect to see.
These include your potential crisis scenarios and a way of assessing their severity; your crisis communication team and individual responsibilities; escalation and approval procedures; stakeholder and contact lists; nominated spokespeople and deputies; key messages; holding statement and communication templates; internal communication processes; monitoring and record keeping; and a process for reviewing what happened afterwards.
The plan also needs to explain what happens when a crisis actually occurs. For example, a practical crisis communication plan might require the team to establish a timeline of events, create a factsheet, identify and prioritise audiences, agree the communication method for each, develop key messages and holding statements, prepare the spokesperson and establish regular updates.
It should also consider the questions different audiences are likely to ask. Customers may want to know how they are affected and when normal service will resume. Employees may be concerned about safety or their jobs. Management will need to understand the business impact, while journalists are likely to ask what happened, when, why and who is responsible.
There are plenty of crisis communication plan examples and templates available online, including the new CIPR/IoD guidance. They provide an excellent starting point. The important next step is making the plan specific enough to be genuinely useful to your business.
Testing, reviewing and improving your plan
Writing the plan isn’t the end of crisis communications planning. People leave businesses. Job roles change. Phone numbers change. New communication channels appear. Businesses introduce new products, enter new markets and face new risks.
It is therefore crucial your crisis communication plan is reviewed regularly. I would recommend a frequency of every six months for most businesses – to make sure names, contact details, access information and responsibilities all remain correct. Equally, look again at the scenarios you originally identified and ask whether they still reflect the organisation’s most significant risks.
Testing is another important part of crisis readiness. A tabletop exercise can put your plan through its paces without waiting for a real incident. Give your crisis team a hypothetical scenario and work through what they would do. Who gets called first? Who approves the statement? Can everyone find the information they need? Where are the gaps?
And if you do experience a real crisis, debrief afterwards. Our crisis planning process includes looking at what went well, what did not, the key lessons, short and long-term impacts and what needs to happen next.
That turns experience into better crisis preparedness for the future.
Building resilience through better crisis communication planning
The real value of crisis communication planning is not the document sitting in a folder somewhere. It is the thinking that goes into creating it.
Taking the time to plan means thinking through the risks your organisation could face and getting the right people involved before a crisis happens. It gives you the opportunity to agree who will make key decisions, who will communicate with different stakeholders and what those audiences are likely to need from you, giving your team a clear framework to follow when the pressure is on.
Several years ago, after completing my crisis communications training, I wrote that I hoped we would never have to use those skills. I still do. But hoping a crisis never happens isn’t a crisis communication strategy.
A well-prepared crisis communication plan can help your organisation respond faster, communicate more consistently and make better decisions when the pressure is on. More importantly, it can help protect the relationships and reputation you have spent years building.
If the CIPR and IoD handbook has prompted you to look at your own crisis preparedness, but you are unsure where to begin, PRG can help. We work with businesses to identify their communications risks and create practical crisis communications plans tailored to their organisation, people and stakeholders.
Find out more about PRG’s crisis communications planning and support
