By the time a crisis is underway, an organisation's reputation reserves are already fixed. You cannot build trust in the middle of losing it — you can only spend what you've already banked.
Reputation is infrastructure, not insurance
Insurance is something you buy and forget until you need it. Infrastructure is something you build, maintain and rely on every day. Reputation behaves like the second, not the first. The relationships with journalists, the consistency of the public message, the credibility of the spokesperson, the track record of doing what you said you would — these are built slowly and drawn on quickly.
The organisations that weather a crisis best are almost never the ones with the best crisis plan. They're the ones with the deepest reserves of earned trust.
What building before a crisis actually looks like
It rarely looks like crisis work at all. It looks like a spokesperson kept media-ready as a matter of routine, not crammed the night before. It looks like relationships with journalists maintained when there is no story to place, so there is credibility to draw on when there is. It looks like message discipline — the same organisation saying the same true things consistently, over years.
Above all, it looks like visible follow-through: doing what you said you would, publicly, again and again, until “we keep our word” is not a claim you make but a reputation you hold. None of this is dramatic. All of it compounds.
The uncomfortable implication
Reputation is a standing operating cost, not a service you call in after something has gone wrong. The organisations that treat it as the latter are, in effect, uninsured. The good news is the reverse is also true: reputation built deliberately, in the quiet times, is the single most valuable asset an organisation can bring to its worst day.