How to Write a Company Boilerplate for Press Releases

Your press release is ready to go, and someone asks for "the boilerplate." You open the last one you sent and find a paragraph written three years ago that mentions a product you no longer sell, a headcount that has doubled and a founding story nobody inside the company tells any more.

A company boilerplate is the short "About" paragraph at the end of every press release, media kit and partner announcement. Journalists copy it, event organisers paste it into programmes, and search engines index it hundreds of times over. That reach makes it one of the most repeated pieces of brand messaging you own, and one of the least maintained. Here is how to write one that is accurate, consistent and actually useful to the people who copy it.

What a company boilerplate needs to do

Think about who reads it. A reporter on deadline needs to know in ten seconds who you are, what you do and why you are credible. A conference organiser needs a paragraph that fits a printed programme. A partner needs wording they can safely reuse without checking with your legal team.

So the boilerplate has three jobs:

• Identify. Your full legal or trading name, what you do and for whom.
• Prove. One or two verifiable facts, such as year founded, number of customers, locations or a notable credential.
• Point. Where to find more, usually your web address written as plain text.

It is not a sales pitch. Words like "leading", "innovative" and "world class" are the first thing an editor deletes, and they make the rest of the paragraph harder to trust.

How to write a company boilerplate step by step

Aim for 70 to 110 words. Shorter than that and you lose the proof; longer and people start trimming it in ways you cannot control.

1. Open with the name and a plain description. "Harbour Lane Studio is a Lisbon based design agency that builds websites for independent hotels." One sentence, no adjectives doing heavy lifting.
2. Add the proof. "Founded in 2014, the studio has delivered more than 220 projects across 11 countries." Use numbers you can defend if a journalist asks.
3. Add what makes you different. Take this from your positioning, ideally the core line in your brand message house. "Every site is built with the hotel's own staff, who update it themselves after launch."
4. Close with the pointer. "Learn more at harbourlanestudio.com." No call to action, no slogan.

Read it aloud. It should sound like the way your founder would describe the company to a stranger at a dinner party, minus the anecdotes. Accuracy matters more than polish here: if a wrong figure from an old boilerplate makes it into print, you will need to ask a reporter for a correction, which is far harder than getting it right first.

Write three lengths, not one

Different places need different lengths. Write all three at once so they stay consistent:

The short version should be a trimmed copy of the standard one, not a new piece of writing. If the wording drifts between versions, people quote the wrong one and you end up with three slightly different descriptions of your company online.

Why "keep it timeless" is the wrong goal

Common advice says a boilerplate should be timeless, so you can write it once and forget it. That advice is why so many boilerplates are vague. To avoid going out of date, writers strip out every number and every concrete detail, and the paragraph turns into "a trusted provider of solutions."

A better goal is easy to update. Keep the specific facts that make the paragraph credible, and simply put a review date on it. Facts like customer counts, office locations and headcount should be checked every six months, or whenever something big changes: a merger, a new market, a name change. If you are going through a rebrand, update the boilerplate before the announcement goes out, as covered in our guide on how to announce a company name change without losing clients.

A paragraph with a dated fact that gets refreshed twice a year beats a vague one that never needs touching. Reporters can use the first. They skip the second.

Keeping the boilerplate consistent across channels

Once approved, store the boilerplate in one place everyone can find, with the date it was last updated and the name of the person who owns it. A shared document pinned in your team chat works fine for a small business.

Then check where the old version is still living. Common hiding places include:

• The press or media page on your website
• Downloadable media kits and fact sheets
• Award and directory listings, which often keep text for years
• Email signatures and proposal templates
• Partner and supplier websites that list you

You cannot fix every old copy, but updating the five or six that rank in search results covers most of what a journalist will find. Search your exact old wording in quotation marks to locate them quickly, then email each site owner the new paragraph with a one line note explaining what changed and why.

A quick review checklist

Before you approve a new boilerplate, run through these questions with one colleague who did not write it:

• Could a stranger explain what we do after reading only the first sentence?
• Is every number accurate today, and do we know where it came from?
• Does it use the same company name, spelling and capitalisation as the logo?
• Have we removed every superlative we cannot prove?
• Does it sound like the rest of our writing, or like a different company?

If any answer is no, fix it now. This paragraph will be copied more often than almost anything else you write this year.

Frequently asked questions

Where does the boilerplate go in a press release?

It goes at the very end, after the main story and quotes, under a heading such as "About [Company Name]." Media contact details usually follow it. If the release involves two companies, each gets its own boilerplate paragraph.

Should a boilerplate be written in the first or third person?

Third person is standard. Journalists and partners paste it into their own material, and "we" reads oddly once it appears on someone else's page. Use the company name in the first sentence and "the company" or the name again after that.

How often should you update a company boilerplate?

Review it at least every six months and after any major change, such as new funding, a merger, a rebrand or entering a new market. Put the last updated date in the master file so nobody has to guess whether the version they found is current.