No Basic Crisis Communication Plan
A data leak or a safeguarding breach happens. The local paper calls. You’ve got twenty minutes before their deadline, and nobody in the building knows who’s actually allowed to speak on the organisation’s behalf.
That’s the moment most small charities discover they never had a crisis communications plan, because they never needed one, until precisely the day they did.
The self-inflicted error isn’t the crisis itself. Crises happen to well-run organisations as often as badly run ones. The error is waiting until the crisis lands to work out, in real time and under pressure, who speaks, what they’re allowed to say, and what “no comment” actually communicates to a journalist and to the public reading the story afterwards.
“No comment” is an admission of guilt
It isn’t meant to read that way. It’s meant to buy time, or protect against saying the wrong thing. But to anyone outside the organisation, “no comment” reads as “we have something to hide,” full stop. Silence in a crisis is never neutral. It’s a statement, just not the one you meant to make.
The rogue spokesperson risk
Without a named, agreed spokesperson, whoever happens to answer the phone becomes the organisation’s voice for that story, whether or not they’re the right person, whether or not they know what can and can’t be said. I’ve watched charities take real, lasting reputational damage this way, not because of the original incident but because of what got said afterwards, badly worded, by whoever was closest to hand. Sometimes it’s a phrase in an official statement that never got checked. Sometimes it’s a volunteer who’s fallen out with the organisation, going public with their own version of events, with nobody having anticipated that this was even a risk worth planning for. Either way, the damage isn’t caused by having a difficult story. It’s caused by having no plan for how to tell it.
Here’s the flip side, because this is worth saying plainly: the same infrastructure that protects you from a crisis is what makes you money when things go right. I’ve seen a good comms plan, run by a team that included volunteers who knew exactly what they were doing and why, bring in over £1,000 in public donations from a single Facebook post, inside sixty minutes. That’s not luck. That’s what happens when the people responsible for your public voice already know what they’re allowed to say, already know the tone, and don’t have to improvise it from a standing start under pressure.
Whether the moment is a crisis or an opportunity, the readiness is the same skill. You either have someone who knows what to say and can move fast, or you don’t.
The fix is genuinely small. One page. A named spokesperson, and a deputy in case they’re unavailable. Two or three pre-approved holding statements that cover the most likely scenarios for your organisation specifically, not generic templates. And an agreement, made calmly in advance, about who is never allowed to speak to the press on the organisation’s behalf without sign-off first.
Twenty minutes isn’t enough time to build a plan. It’s exactly enough time to use one, if it already exists.