The Red Binder Nobody Reads (and How to Fix It)

Most people think public relations is about press releases and splashy events. On a recent episode of The Creative Stack, Georg sat down with Alyssa Burns, founder and CEO of Alyssa Burns Communications, and the conversation went somewhere far more useful: what actually builds trust, what falls apart when leadership stays quiet, and what a real crisis communications plan looks like once you get past the binder nobody’s opened in three years.

Alyssa’s path into PR started at the dinner table. Her mother attended Columbia’s journalism school when women made up a fraction of the class, and her father spent his career in newspapers. She went on to work at Edelman, the largest PR agency in the world, and later moved client-side at Kraft Foods, giving her a rare view of both sides of the relationship.

The Work You’re Not Supposed to Notice

Alyssa’s take on her own field: the best communications work is invisible. When it’s done well, a company’s messaging looks like it just happened naturally. What people don’t see is the iceberg underneath, the weeks of internal alignment, message testing, and stakeholder conversations that made it look effortless.

That’s not a bad description of good IT either. Nobody notices the network until it goes down. The work that actually matters is the work nobody sees.

Silence Is Never the Right Answer

One of Alyssa’s clearer points: even when you don’t have an answer yet, saying nothing is worse than saying you’re working on it. Silence reads as either indifference or as something being hidden, and either interpretation costs you more trust than an honest “we don’t know yet, but here’s when we’ll follow up.”

It’s the same instinct we have to fight in IT. When something’s broken and the cause isn’t obvious yet, the temptation is to go quiet until there’s a clean answer. Clients don’t need a clean answer. They need to know someone’s on it.

How Trust Actually Gets Built

Alyssa was direct that trust isn’t built in one big moment. It’s built through hundreds of small interactions, most of them starting with listening rather than advising. She described developing a kind of intuition for when a client is holding something back, not out of dishonesty, but because they didn’t think a detail was relevant. Part of the job is asking the right question to surface it anyway, especially when timing matters.

She distilled her philosophy into three fundamentals. Communication is a business strategy, not a subset of marketing, and every business decision carries a communication component. Internal communication matters as much as external, since employees who don’t hear something from leadership first will fill in the gaps themselves, usually badly. And credibility is earned over time through consistent action, not manufactured in the middle of a crisis.

The Red Binder Nobody Reads

Alyssa calls it red binder syndrome: the crisis communications plan that sits in a drawer, was built once, and hasn’t been opened, tested, or discussed with leadership since.

Unfortunately, we see the same pattern constantly, just with a different binder. A company builds a crisis or disaster recovery plan during a compliance push or after a scare, checks the box, and then never looks at it again until something actually goes wrong, at which point nobody remembers where it’s saved, let alone whether it’s still accurate.

That’s not a reflection of the team that built it. It’s a structural issue: a plan gets treated as a one-time deliverable instead of an ongoing practice.

A few things separate a plan that actually works from one that just exists:

• Keep emergency contact numbers current, not whatever was accurate when the document was first drafted.
• Define the first move clearly. In Alyssa’s case: don’t talk to media, take a name and number, escalate.
• Run tabletop training a few times a year with the people who’d actually be on the front line, not just leadership.
• Revisit the plan whenever the business changes meaningfully, not just annually by default.

We run a version of the same exercise for technology risk. The parallel held up well in the conversation: a plan that’s never been rehearsed isn’t really a plan.

Where Cybersecurity Fits Into Crisis Communications

One of the more useful exchanges was about a gap Alyssa is now building into her clients’ crisis plans directly: what to say when a breach or ransomware attack happens.

Unfortunately, we see this gap constantly from the technology side. A company can have a strong incident response plan for containing a breach technically, and still have no idea how to tell employees what happened, let alone customers, and that uncertainty compounds the damage well beyond the technical incident itself.

That’s not a reflection of the IT team’s competence. It’s a structural issue: incident response and crisis communications usually live in separate plans, owned by separate people, who rarely talk to each other until the moment it’s too late to plan calmly.

A few practices help close that gap before it matters:

• Loop in whoever owns crisis communications when building or updating an incident response plan, not after an incident starts.
• Pre-draft messaging templates for likely scenarios (breach, ransomware, outage) so no one is writing from scratch under pressure.
• Agree in advance on who talks to employees, who talks to customers, and who talks to media, if anyone.
• Treat communications readiness as part of the incident response plan, not a separate afterthought.

It’s a piece of risk management that tends to fall through the cracks between the IT team and the communications team, and it shouldn’t.

What Actually Changed, and What Didn’t

Alyssa’s read on the biggest shift in her field: speed. What used to take hours or days to spread through traditional media now spreads globally in minutes through social platforms, and organizations are expected to respond fast and thoughtfully at the same time. But the fundamentals haven’t moved. People still expect honesty, transparency, and accountability, technology just raised the stakes on how quickly you have to deliver them.

On AI specifically, Alyssa uses it for research, summarizing documents, and monitoring media coverage, but she’s clear that it doesn’t replace originality, judgment, or the ability to read what someone isn’t saying in a conversation. That’s a sentiment we hear from nearly every guest on this show, regardless of industry.

The Takeaway

Alyssa’s closing line is worth holding onto: good communication informs people, great communication builds trust, and trust is every organization’s most valuable asset

The Creative Stack is produced by Valiant Technology, a managed IT services provider based in New York specializing in serving creative agencies and PR firms. Listen to episodes at podcast.thevaliantway.com and learn more at thevaliantway.com.