Crisis Playbooks

Crisis Communications Playbooks Skill

When to Use

• Service outages, security incidents, compliance/regulatory events.
• Negative press cycles or social media escalations.
• Sensitive executive/HR news requiring coordinated messaging.

Framework

1. Severity Matrix – classify incidents (P1-P4) with response SLAs and approvers.
2. Escalation Tree – who to notify, in what order, via which channels.
3. Message Kits – holding statements, customer/partner/internal scripts, social/status updates.
4. Channel Sequence – timeline for status page, email, press, social, internal posts.
5. Monitoring & Recovery – tracking sentiment, rumor control, follow-up updates.

Templates

• Incident briefing doc (facts, unknowns, owners, deadlines).
• Approval checklist for legal/security/executive signoff.
• Post-incident report with RCA, comms metrics, and improvement actions.

Tips

• Rehearse quarterly with tabletop exercises.
• Keep localized versions for regulated markets.
• Archive every incident’s comms artifacts for compliance and learning.