A blank document at 2am
A food manufacturer's product is being shared on social media with a claim that it made people ill. A national reporter emails the press office asking for comment by 6am. The agency duty manager knows the client did scenario planning two years ago and that there were holding statements, but the file is somewhere in a SharePoint folder named after an account director who has left.
She writes a statement from scratch, sends it to the client's head of communications and their legal adviser, and waits. Legal rewrites it substantially. It goes out at 7.15, after the first report has run with the line that the company had not commented.
Why prepared statements are never ready
- Scenario planning happens once, at onboarding or after a scare, then stops.
- Statements are stored in documents with vague names and no index.
- Approval was given for a version years ago, but facts in it have changed.
- Statements are written as whole paragraphs, so adapting them at speed is hard.
- Legal and communications sign-off on the template was never recorded, so it has to be repeated.
Scenario planning itself is a skilled piece of crisis consultancy, and the decisions in it belong to the client and their advisers. What fails is the storage and upkeep that turns the plan into something usable at 2am.
The cost of a slow first response
Silence gets reported as silence. The longer a company takes to say anything, the more a story is shaped by others. Writing from scratch under pressure produces weaker statements and longer legal review. It also puts the most stress on the most junior person on the rota at the worst time.
How we build the statement library
- Each client's scenarios are listed with a short name: product recall, data incident, site accident, executive departure, customer complaint going viral, supplier failure.
- Each scenario holds one or more holding statements written as templates with fields in brackets, such as location, date and what is known.
- Every template records who approved it on the client side, when, and a review date. Past the review date it shows as needing reconfirmation.
- Supporting material sits with each scenario: fact sheet, spokesperson, approvers, Q&A lines and the channels to use.
- In a live incident the duty manager picks the scenario, fills the fields in a form, and sees the draft with only the changed words highlighted, which speeds up client and legal review.
- Every version sent, and every approval, is saved to the incident record.
| Library item | Holds | Checked by |
|---|---|---|
| Scenario | Short description and triggers | Agency crisis lead |
| Holding statement | Template with fill-in fields | Client comms and their advisers |
| Q&A lines | Likely questions and approved answers | Client comms and their advisers |
| Approval record | Approver, date, review date | Library, automatically |
| Incident version | Filled statement as sent | Saved to the incident record |
Review reminders go to the client owner by email with a link to confirm or update, so templates stay current without a full workshop each time.
The 2am email, handled differently
The duty manager opens the client's library on her phone, chooses the product safety scenario and fills in the product name, the date and a line saying the company is investigating. The draft shows the approved template with three fields changed. The client's head of communications sees only those changes highlighted and approves quickly. Legal already signed off the template, so they review only the new facts.
A holding statement reaches the reporter well before the deadline, and the incident record shows exactly what went out and who approved it.
Checklist for your clients
- Holding statements exist but nobody knows where.
- Templates were approved years ago and never reviewed.
- Duty staff write statements from scratch during incidents.
- Legal reviews every statement in full because nothing is pre-approved.
- There is no record of which version went to which journalist.