Introduction
Six critical stages make up the PRIMER framework for crisis communications: Plan, Rehearse, Implement, Maintain, Evaluate and Recover. This page includes operational checklists and templates to help you deploy the framework effectively.
Assembling your crisis team
When an emergency hits, the first hour of team mobilisation dictates the entire trajectory of your communications response. This checklist functions as an immediate operational tool to help leaders establish a balanced, agile response cell by working through five foundational diagnostic questions.
Question 1: Does everyone understand the background to the incident or crisis?
Make sure you encourage everyone to share what is known about the situation. What do the media coverage, officials and any other sources of information reveal? Crucially, ask yourself the basic, but critical, question: is this a crisis, and is it your crisis to manage – this will give you a clear sense of your organisation’s role in the response.
Question 2: What range of expertise and knowledge will you need to respond effectively?
Think about the skills and knowledge you will need to respond effectively to the situation you’re facing so that you start to understand the key people you will need to build your team around. Essential skills needed to respond and handle a crisis should be relevant to handling the initial crisis response, the duration and the aftermath. To deliver a coordinated response these skills must be mapped against the four I’s of the GCS Competency Framework: Insight, Ideas, Implementation and Impact.
Essential skills:
- Reactive media queries (implementation)
- Generating proactive media and digital handling (ideas)
- Managing stakeholders (implementation)
- Targeting key audiences (insight)
- Evaluation and lessons learnt (impact)
Question 3: Who else beyond your organisation will have a stake in the response?
A crisis rarely involves a single organisation, so it’s vital that you understand who else will have a stake in the response and start finding ways of making this an integrated effort. This is where the time that you invested in planning and rehearsing can make a difference as it will mean you are likely to have established relationships and protocols with other organisations. If you haven’t, it is important that you work fast to make connections with key contacts and establish appropriate ways of working with them.
Question 4: Is everyone clear about who is leading what aspect of the response?
You are likely to be facing a complex, fast-moving situation, so be clear about who is responsible for what within your crisis team. Make sure everyone understands their own role, but also knows how their actions may affect others in the team – it is important that everyone recognises how they fit into the wider effort. Take the time now to set the direction for the team, so that there is consensus on what is expected of everyone involved.
Question 5: Have you got a reliable way of keeping track of progress across the team?
In a crisis situation, there can be a danger of losing control of the process as the pace of the response quickens. While it may not seem the most obvious thing to do upfront, it is worth establishing how everyone will share information and keep the team up to date on progress. The reporting should be proportionate so that it doesn’t detract from the vital job of delivery, but it is an important part of setting up an effective team response.
Helping your team recover from a crisis
During times of crisis, communication professionals can often be the people who have worked the most hours, sacrificed the greatest amount of personal time and have effectively worked at the coal face to manage the crisis.
How you choose to acknowledge this will differ from crisis to crisis or depending on the characteristics of your team, but here are a few ideas to get you started.
1. Remember to say thank you
It’s an obvious point, but one that can be lost in the rush to return to normal business. You may want to hold a team meeting where you publicly thank individuals or the whole team for their efforts, and it may also be appropriate to provide one-to-one feedback to those who have gone above and beyond.
2. Make sure you honour any overtime or leave entitlements
During a crisis, you often hear managers and team leaders encouraging people to work longer hours or weekends with the promise of lieu time or overtime payments, yet these offers can be forgotten in the aftermath. If you have promised lieu time or overtime payments, make sure they are delivered.
3. Reflect outstanding performance in end-of-year reviews
In a similar way, make sure the work undertaken by team members is recorded in end-of-year appraisals and consider whether bonus schemes might be used to acknowledge those who made a particularly significant contribution.
4. Ensure the wider organisation acknowledges your team’s role
As well as your personal gratitude, it is worth encouraging senior figures within the organisation to thank teams. This might mean encouraging your Secretary of State or Chief Executive to speak to your teams or email their thanks: a small gesture that can make a big difference to morale.
5. Make use of the connections you have built with colleagues across your organisation
Crises often bring teams that usually interact on an ad hoc basis only together to work almost inseparably. Make use of these new connections, foster them and see how maintaining these closer working relationships may be able to help your team in the long run.
Planning a live exercise rehearsal
Until an emergency plan has been rigorously tested in a simulated environment, it is impossible to guarantee its viability under the pressure of a live hit. This comprehensive checklist serves as an end-to-end project management framework to help teams successfully design, execute, and evaluate crisis simulation exercises. Rather than leaving preparation to chance, this checklist systematically guides organisers through three critical phases of exercise delivery.
Scoping and preparation:
- Agree the scenario and the aim
- Assemble a planning team and agree the objectives for each test area
- Agree the exercise scenario and timelines
- Confirm participant availability, including media or voluntary agencies
- Scope and confirm the facilities needed such as transport, buildings and equipment
- Ensure that all communications to be used have been tested prior to the exercise
Briefing and safety management:
- Check that participants, umpires and directing staff have been briefed
- If the exercise links a number of activities or functions, test individually beforehand
- Ensure everyone is aware of the process if a real emergency occurs during the exercise
- For larger-scale simulations, ensure the safety of spectators and factor in marshalling and updates
- For the longer exercises, consider catering and amenities
- Ensure all parties are insured in case of an accident
- For larger-scale exercises, warn the local media, emergency services switchboards and any neighbours who might be concerned by the exercise
Debriefing and evaluation:
- After the exercise, organise a ‘hot’ debrief with key players and circulate a date for a full debrief
- Evaluate the exercise and feed in lessons learned to the overall plan
- Agree recommendations and assign follow-up actions and timescales
- Share evaluation with participating organisations
Further resources on testing emergency plans:
- Emergency preparedness (GOV.UK)
- Response and recovery (GOV.UK) outlines elements of emergency response that need to be tested through exercise
Post-crisis learning and application ledger
Capturing feedback immediately after an emergency is useless if those insights are buried in a static report and forgotten. The post-crisis learning and application ledger is an operational audit tool designed to convert real-time observations into systemic, lasting organisational improvements. Rather than treating post-crisis debriefs as generic feedback sessions, this ledger forces teams to categorise every observation chronologically across the six stages of the PRIMER lifecycle (Plan, Rehearse, Implement, Maintain, Evaluate and Recover).
By isolating the specific issue, defining the root lesson identified and mapping it to a concrete action, an explicit owner and a firm target deadline, this ledger establishes absolute accountability. It serves as your team’s practical bridge between surviving a past crisis and optimising for the next one.
Template ledger
| Issue | Lesson identified | Action | Owner | By what date | |
| Plan | |||||
| Rehearse | |||||
| Implement | |||||
| Maintain | |||||
| Evaluate | |||||
| Recover |
How to apply the ledger successfully
Distinguish between an “Issue” and a “Lesson”
It is easy to mix these two columns up, which leaves us with a ledger that isn’t truly actionable. To avoid this, look at how we map a real-world scenario across these fields in the example below:
- The issue (what happened): During Stage 3 (Implement), the media cell was overwhelmed by 200 incoming press emails in the first 40 minutes, causing a backlog.
- The lesson identified (why it happened and what it means): Our baseline staffing model lacks an automatic ‘surge trigger’ to instantly pull in mutual aid from adjacent digital and stakeholder teams during a live hit.
- The action (how to fix it): Draft an automatic surge trigger protocol into the Plan that reallocates 3 digital officers to the media desk the moment a crisis is declared.
Enforce the “Rule of absolute ownership”
- Never assign a team name as an owner. Listing “The Press Office” or “Digital Team” guarantees that nobody takes personal accountability, and the deadline will slip.
- Always assign a named individual. Every line item must be assigned to a specific person. If an action requires collaboration across multiple desks, one single person must still be designated as the ultimate delivery lead.
Run a tiered “Wash-up” strategy
Do not try to fill out the entire ledger in a single, massive meeting when team members are still exhausted. Apply a structured, three-tiered debrief schedule:
- The “Hot” debrief (within 24 Hours): A rapid, 15-minute capture session right as the incident closes. Focus entirely on immediate technical issues (for example, broken links, server crashes, missing passwords).
- The tactical wash-up (within 5 to 7 Days): Gather the core response cell once the team has slept. Step chronologically through the PRIMER lifecycle to map the operational highs and lows, populating the bulk of the ledger.
- The strategic review (within 30 Days): Senior leadership reviews the ledger to evaluate organisational impact, sign off on funding or structural changes required by the “Actions” column and formally embed updates into the master CONOPs (Concept of Operations) framework. Read our Crisis communications operating model: Prepare, respond, recover to learn more about using CONOPs.
Turn the ledger into a living document
The ledger should not be archived once it is filled out. It should be used as the mandatory baseline agenda for your next ‘Rehearse’ phase of managing a crisis. Before designing your next tabletop simulation, the exercise coordinator must review the active ledger to ensure the new scenario directly tests whether the previous “Lessons identified” have been successfully resolved in the real world.