A Closer Look at Crisis Communication Planning

When a crisis hits your organization, you don’t have nearly as much time as you would think to present to the public. Whether it’s a data breach, a public safety concern, a funding controversy, or an internal scandal, the public deserves transparency. And your response following a crisis shapes how the public, your stakeholders, and the media see you for years to come. Let’s take a closer look at crisis communication planning so you know what to implement at your organization.

What Crisis Communication Planning Covers

A crisis communication plan is a living framework that governs how your organization identifies a crisis and decides who does what, what to say, when to say it, and which channels to use.

Crisis communication is absolutely crucial in the nonprofit and public sectors, perhaps even more so than in the private sector. After all, you’re accountable to the public, so a misstep in your messaging could cost you the mission-critical trust you’ve spent years building.

The Core Components of a Solid Plan

Most effective crisis communication plans share the following elements.

A Designated Crisis Communication Team

You need to know exactly who’s responsible for managing crisis communications. This team typically includes your executive director, a communications lead, a legal advisor, and at least one department head with direct knowledge of operations. Each person should have a clearly defined role so that when pressure is high, there’s no confusion about who does what.

Approved Spokespersons

Not everyone in your organization should be speaking to the media or the public during a crisis. Your plan should name specific authorized spokespersons (these should be people in your crisis communication team) and provide them with media training. The plan should also include guidelines for what to do if media approaches staff members who aren’t on that list.

A Message Development Framework

Lastly, your plan should include templates and processes for drafting crisis-related messages quickly. Though you can prepare scripts for certain predictable issues, you mostly want templates that your team can tailor to the facts of the crisis at hand. These templates help your team respond with accuracy and consistency, despite being under a lot of pressure. As a starting point, consider the three pillars of a good crisis communication template:

1. what happened
2. what you’re doing about it
3. when can the next update be expected

How to Identify and Categorize a Crisis

Not every difficult situation is a crisis, but every crisis starts as a difficult situation. Therefore, your plan needs a system for evaluating incidents as they arise. Many organizations use a tiered system with three levels:

• Tier 3 covers minor issues that are internally manageable with minimal public communication.
• Tier 2 involves incidents that require proactive outreach to key stakeholders but haven’t yet reached the public eye.
• Tier 1 represents full-scale crises that demand immediate, broad public communication.

When you have this structure in place, your team won’t have to debate how serious something is while the clock is ticking. You make the call based on defined criteria, and the plan activates accordingly.

Stakeholder Mapping and Notification Protocols

During a crisis, you can’t communicate with everyone at once, nor should you. Your plan should identify your primary stakeholders, rank them by priority for notification, and outline specific protocols for reaching each group. For a nonprofit, that hierarchy might look like this: your board of directors hears first, then staff, then major funders, then program partners, then your broader supporter base, and finally the general public.

Getting this order right matters. If a major donor finds out about a crisis from a news headline before they hear it from you, they might lose trust in your organization.

Channel Strategy: Where You’ll Communicate

 

Different crises call for different communication channels, and your plan should address all of them.

Media Relations

Your plan should include contact information for your local media outlets, a process for issuing press releases, and guidelines for granting or declining interviews. You should also know which reporters typically cover your sector and have established those relationships before you ever need them.

Social Media

Social media moves fast. Your plan needs a protocol for monitoring, responding, and, if necessary, pausing scheduled posts during a crisis. You should also clarify who has authorization to post on behalf of the organization and what the approval process looks like.

Internal Communications

Your staff and volunteers need to hear from leadership during a crisis too. They’re often fielding questions from community members, and they deserve accurate information so they can respond appropriately.

Holding Statements

A holding statement is a brief, carefully worded message that acknowledges a situation is occurring without providing details you haven’t yet confirmed. Here’s an example: “We’re aware of the situation and are working to gather all the facts. We’ll have a full update within [timeframe].” This buys you time to respond accurately.

What To Do When a Crisis Hits Before the Plan Is Ready

If you’re reading this in the middle of a situation and you don’t have a plan in place, here’s what to do right now.

1. Pause before you communicate publicly.
2. Gather your decision-makers.
3. Agree on the basic facts of what’s happened and what you know for certain.
4. Designate a single spokesperson.
5. Issue a holding statement that acknowledges the situation without overstating what you know.
6. Then use that window to build out your immediate response.

It’s not ideal, but it does preserve more public trust than a polished response that arrives too late.

Putting Your Plan to Work

Crisis communication planning isn’t a one-time project. It’s an ongoing organizational commitment that fits into a broader strategic communications plan that reflects how seriously you take your relationship with the public and the people you serve. If your organization doesn’t have a formal plan yet, now is the time to build one, and the Impact Group is the partner to work with. We offer public sector strategic communications consulting services and can help you develop a plan that fits your organization’s structure and stakeholder landscape. When a crisis comes, you’ll be glad you worked with us.