If your crisis comms “tick all the boxes”… why do they still fall flat?
Updated: Aug 17
Most organisations have a crisis communications template sitting somewhere. It usually has five steps, placeholder text, and gets approved by legal, signed off by leadership, and sent the moment something goes wrong.
Here's what a typical template looks like:
[Company] is currently experiencing [a disruption to operations / a service interruption] affecting [specific market / route / facility]. We are aware of the impact this is having on [customers / end consumers] and have activated our [contingency protocols.] Our teams are working around the clock to [restore normal service / resolve the technical issue]. We are in direct contact with affected customers and will provide updated timelines as the situation develops. We thank [our customers] for [your/their] patience and understanding during this time.
The structure is sound:
Naming the issue
Acknowledging the impact
Reassuring action is being taken
Setting expectations and a timeline
Thanking customers for their patience
It ticks every box.
Technically correct, universally approved, but if you just fill in the blanks, by the time your message travels from structure to audience, it's been drained of everything human.
Your audience doesn't read your message the way your organisation wrote it. They're reading it through a different filter, asking 3 questions:
How does this affect me?
Do they understand my frustration?
What happens next?
Which is why McDonald's response to an egg shortage is worth paying close attention to. It's the exact same template. The difference is who they wrote it for.
The situation: a very real “crisis”
McDonald’s had to pause its Breakfast Wrap due to an egg shortage.
Not catastrophic. Not even reputationally dangerous.
But still a disruption. So they did what every company does.
They reached for the template and issued a statement.
And opened with: “We’ve got egg on our face”
From there, they explained the shortage, acknowledged the inconvenience, reassured customers they were working on it, gave a rough timeline ("hopefully next week"), and thanked customers for their patience.
Strip away the tone, and it's textbook crisis comms. Every element sits inside the standard corporate playbook. What changed wasn't the structure. It was the delivery.
Let's map it side by side.
The message didn't start with "Dear Customer."
That's not a small detail — it's the first signal this wasn't written for everyone.
"Dear Customer" creates distance. It tells the reader they're one of many. Yes, it's accurate, but cold.
"Dear Breakfast Wrap fans" does the opposite. It assumes familiarity, treats a missing menu item as something people have a relationship with with the thing that's missing— a preference, a habit, a small ritual. And once you open that way, everything after lands differently: the egg pun stops feeling like a PR stunt, the apology stops feeling hollow, the thank-you stops feeling like a formality. From line one, the reader's already been told: we know who you are, and we're talking to you.
Naming the issue
What most companies write: “We are currently experiencing a disruption…”
What McDonald’s wrote: “Turns out the return of our iconic Breakfast Wrap has been so popular, it’s created a shortage of a key ingredient....”
Acknowledging the impact/inconvenience
What most companies write: “We understand the impact this is having…”
What McDonald’s wrote:“We understand that it’s no yolk to have your breakfast plans disrupted…”
Reassuring action is being taken
What most companies write: “Our teams are working around the clock…”
What McDonald’s wrote: “We’ll soldier on, working tirelessly to bring it back.”
Setting expectations and a timeline
What most companies write: “Normal service will resume by [timeframe]”
What McDonald’s wrote: “Hopefully next week.”
Thanking customers for their patience
What most companies write: "We thank our customers for their patience and understanding during this time."
What McDonald’s wrote: “We thank every single fan of the breakfast wrap.…for your egg-ceptional patience and understanding.”
Matching tone to stakes
None of this works if the tone doesn't match the severity. This wasn't a safety incident, a data breach, or a financial scandal — it was breakfast. So McDonald's didn't overcorrect into corporate seriousness, but they also didn't lose accountability.
That balance is harder than it looks. Most organisations fall into one of two failure modes: over-formalising, treating every disruption like a catastrophe until the response feels detached and disproportionate, or over-casualising, reaching for humour without the authority to back it up, which undermines credibility. McDonald's sat in the middle — clear, responsible, and still unmistakably themselves.
This isn't a case for making your crisis comms more playful. If a bank wrote "we've got egg on our face" during a systems outage, it would land badly. The lesson isn't humour. It's matching your tone to your audience, your brand, and the weight of what happened.
How to translate your own template
None of this works as a one-off inspiration.
It works as a habit.
Before your next crisis statement goes out, run it through four questions:
1. Who will be reading this? — not who's approving it Legal, leadership, and your audience are three different readers with three different needs. Write the first draft for your audience. Let approval steps sharpen it, not rewrite it into a category label. If "Dear Customer" is where your draft starts, you've written for the room, not the reader.
2. Where's the sentence that could belong to any company? Read the draft
If you removed your company name, could this message belong to any organisation? Those are the sentences doing no work — they're insurance, not communication. You don't need to cut all of them (some genuinely are legal necessities), but you should know exactly which ones they are and why they're there.
3. What's the feeling under the fact, and did you name it? "We understand the impact" states a fact about impact. It doesn't say what the impact feels like to the person reading it — disrupted mornings, a cancelled order, a plan that fell through. You don't need McDonald's puns to do this. You need one sentence that shows you know what the disruption is costing someone, in their terms, not yours. And make it tangible.
4. Does the tone match the stakes — not your habit? This is the check most teams skip, because tone is usually set by house style, not by the situation. Before sending, ask what this specific event calls for.
The Bottom Line for Your Crisis Comms
Your template isn't the problem — McDonald's used the same one, exactly as intended, so nothing important got missed. What they understood is that the template is the floor, not the ceiling. You follow it so nothing gets forgotten, then you translate it to match what your audience wants to hear.
Get that right, and the result doesn't read like it was assembled by five different departments on autopilot. It reads like it was written by someone who knew exactly who was on the other end, and was genuinely a little embarrassed to have let them down.
Here's a simple test for this. Remove your company name. Could this message belong to any organisation? If yes, that's the part that needs rewriting because when your message could come from anyone, it doesn't come from you.
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