When a crisis breaks, the response will reach the very highest levels of your organisation. Having plans and procedures in place ahead of time is a hygiene factor to ensure organisational readiness to respond to such an event.
A ‘bottom drawer statement’ is a vital part of your preparedness. What’s this? The term has traditionally referred to the media statement you’d issue in the event of a crisis – the one you write and tuck away in the bottom drawer, hoping you’ll never need to use it.
Nowadays, you can think of a bottom drawer statement as any key messages you’d issue to your stakeholders should the unthinkable happen. It’s more likely to take the form of a Crisis Communication Plan and live on a SharePoint site (make sure you keep printed copies in secure locations in case your crisis is a cybersecurity crash!).
Any narrative you prepare in advance may need to be adapted to reflect the realities of a crisis when one does occur. But writing a crisis narrative in advance is never time wasted.
First and foremost, you won’t have time to write a sentence by committee in a crisis. Developing a bottom drawer statement gives your board and executive the opportunity to debate the style and tone of your crisis narrative without the pressure of a real crisis escalating on social media while you write.
Developing a bottom drawer statement is also a great way to get your communications and operational teams across your key messages in advance of needing to use them. In a large or complex organisation you may have a dozen or more bottom draw statements to guide your response to multiple crisis types: natural disasters, cybersecurity breaches, safety incidents, financial losses, fraud or employee misconduct, environmental incidents – the list goes on. A well-maintained Crisis Communication Plan serves as a reliable playbook for your frontline communications teams so they can swiftly execute your crisis response, assisted by templates and pre-approved key messages.
Another benefit of a bottom drawer statement is that it can ease pressure in what is bound to be a high-pressure environment. Your sleep-at-night-factor will be way higher when you plan for the worst but hope for the best. The media landscape moves fast these days. Once upon a time we operated in a 24-hour news cycle where businesses had the luxury of developing responses to meet 5pm daily news deadlines. Now we live in a 24-hour opinion cycle, where one influential voice on social media can damage your brand and reputation in an instant. Forget the research on best-practice response times. These days it’s so fast it’s almost instant. Have your message crafted in advance so you can get your narrative out fast and first in a crisis.
Perhaps a less obvious but highly valuable benefit of crafting a bottom drawer statement is the chance to ask the question: does our crisis response stack up? If you don’t buy your own crisis narrative chances are your audience won’t either. What’s missing in your crisis response? Is this a preventable incident that you should be investing in now? Are there recovery supports that you should have in place already? Drafting your crisis response gives you a valuable opportunity to stand in the shoes of your customers, employees and stakeholders and see things from their perspective. What could you do in advance of a crisis to safeguard their interests? Taking genuine steps to protect those at risk of harm from a potential incident will provide some of your strongest key messages in a crisis.
Remember, you can’t ‘spin’ your way out of a crisis – authenticity and transparency are vital. Your crisis narrative must own any shortcomings, reflect genuine efforts to make things right and rebuild trust by showing you’re taking steps to prevent a repeat incident. BBS are experts in crisis management and can partner with you on a crisis response that can protect, and even enhance, your reputation. If you think it’s time to dust off your bottom draw statement, get in touch with us today.
