How to Write a Press Release Boilerplate

A boilerplate is the short standard paragraph about your company that runs near the end of every press release: what you do, who you serve, and where you are based, written the same way release after release. It exists so a reporter who has never covered you before gets enough context in three or four sentences to place the news.

What goes into a boilerplate

Include what the company does in one clause, the market or customers it serves, where it is headquartered, and one fact that anchors its scale or history, such as a founding year or a number of locations, only if that fact is accurate today. Leave out product features, recent news, which belongs in the release body, and any claim you cannot support, such as “leading” or “award-winning,” unless you name the specific award.

Length

Keep it to three or four sentences, roughly 40 to 80 words. A boilerplate that runs longer starts to compete with the release for the reader’s attention, and most of the extra length gets cut anyway if the release is later used as a source for a shorter piece.

Where it sits

The boilerplate goes near the bottom of the release, after the body and quote, usually introduced with a heading like “About [Company]” and followed by the media contact. Many companies also keep a copy of the current boilerplate on their website’s press or about page, so anyone quoting the company can copy the exact wording rather than paraphrase it.

Keeping it current

Review the boilerplate whenever something in it changes: a funding round that shifts the description from “startup” to a later stage, an office move, a new product category, or a change in leadership named in the paragraph. A boilerplate that still describes a five-person company after the team has grown to fifty tells a careful reader that nobody checked the release before it went out. Treat the boilerplate as part of the release that needs proofreading, not a fixed block of text you paste in without reading.

One fill-in pattern

A pattern you can adapt for most companies:

“[Company] [does what, in one clause] for [who it serves]. Founded in [year], the company is based in [city]. [One optional sentence: a scale fact, a customer category, or a mission line].”

Illustration, using a fictional company: “Brightloop builds inventory software for independent retailers. Founded in 2019, the company is based in Denver, Colorado. Brightloop works with shop owners in more than a dozen states.” Adjust the middle sentence for a nonprofit, a solo founder, or a company with more than one location, but keep the order: what it does, when and where it started, one grounding fact.

Common mistakes

A few patterns show up often. Writing a new boilerplate for every release, instead of reusing one with small updates, lets the company’s self-description drift from month to month without anyone deciding to change it. Padding it with adjectives instead of facts turns three sentences of context into three sentences of marketing that a reporter has to read past. And forgetting to update it after a material change, such as a new headquarters or a change in leadership, means two releases from the same company can end up describing two different companies. If you keep the boilerplate in one shared file and update it there first, every release that follows will already be right. See the format guide for where the boilerplate sits relative to the rest of the release, and the press kit guide for how a longer company description differs from this short one.