Crisis Communications Editing and Proofreading Services

At 4:40 on a Thursday a reporter calls to say the story runs at 6:00. Eighty minutes earlier, a supplier had told the company that customer records may have been copied from a shared system. Legal counsel wants nothing in writing that reads as an admission, while the chief executive wants reassurance. The customers in that system want to know whether their records are among them. The ninety words agreed at 5:20 will be quoted in every article about the incident for a decade.

The documents we edit for Crisis Communications

Holding statements and initial responses, media statements as facts develop, customer and affected-party notifications, employee communications, regulator and stakeholder notifications, spokesperson briefing and question preparation, social media response wording, and website incident pages and update logs make up the bulk of this work. It also covers apology and remediation statements, executive statements and video scripts, communications after the incident and lessons-learned messaging, plans and templates prepared in advance, and simulation and exercise material. Our editors work at the speed these documents require.

What the editing involves

The holding statement is published first, quoted most, and written at the moment the organization knows least. Its standard form is three clauses: the matter is being taken extremely seriously, an investigation is under way, and there will be no further comment. Those clauses carry no information, read as defensive, and leave the account to whoever else is talking.

In the case above, two things were confirmed by 5:20: the supplier reported the exposure at 3:20, and the system held names and email addresses rather than payment details. A statement carrying those two facts, and saying that the number of affected customers is unknown, is worth more than any expression of seriousness. Setting out what is not yet known is accurate, and it shows the organization understands which questions matter. Concern reads differently when directed at people rather than at circumstances, and "we are sorry that customers' details may have been taken" answers a question that "we regret this situation" leaves untouched.

Two further habits separate a workable holding statement from a poor one. Any step already taken is better named as a step than as a process, and "the shared system was disconnected at 4:15" tells a reader what "we have activated our incident response protocol" does not. The next update should be promised for a stated time and issued then, even when it reports that nothing has changed, because an organization that misses its own deadline confirms the impression it was trying to correct. Statements for foreseeable incidents are better drafted in advance, since twenty minutes is not enough time to invent this document, although it is enough to adapt one that exists.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in strict confidence. That includes live incidents and material under legal privilege, though privileged material should reach us only with your counsel's agreement. We are editors, not crisis advisors or attorneys, and we offer no view on strategy, liability, disclosure obligations, or any operational decision. What we can do is make the words clear and make them fast, when there is no time to spare.