crisis-communications

name	crisis-communications
description	Coordinate crisis communications around verified facts, affected audiences, decision authority, empathy, uncertainty, operational response, update cadence, corrections, and durable source of truth without speculating beyond evidence.

Crisis Communications

Use when an incident, outage, security event, safety issue, public controversy, legal development, or operational failure creates material stakeholder concern.

Procedure

1. Establish the incident owner, communications authority, known facts, unknowns, affected audiences, current operational actions, and information that cannot yet be disclosed.
2. Create one verified source of truth and timestamp updates so internal and external messages do not fork.
3. State what happened or is happening only to the level supported by evidence, what impact is known, what people should do now, and when another update is expected.
4. Use clear human language and acknowledge material customer or community impact without premature blame, excuses, or unsupported root-cause claims.
5. Coordinate status pages, direct customer notices, media statements, social/community responses, employee guidance, partner messaging, and support scripts as relevant.
6. Route legal, security, privacy, safety, or regulatory disclosure decisions to their owning authorities rather than improvising them in PR.
7. Correct material misinformation or prior errors promptly and preserve an update trail.
8. After stabilization, support a factual retrospective and update the playbook from observed communication failures or stakeholder needs.

Decision rules

• Speed matters, but false certainty creates a second incident.
• Separate confirmed impact from investigation hypotheses.
• Tell affected people what they can do now when actionable guidance exists.
• Crisis messaging must follow operational reality, not get ahead of it.

Quality gate

Communication is effective when verified facts and uncertainty remain distinguishable, affected audiences receive timely actionable updates, all channels share one current truth, specialist disclosure decisions stay with their owners, corrections are traceable, and messaging supports rather than obstructs incident response.