Crisis Management: What to Do in the First 24 Hours

Crisis management is the discipline of protecting an organisation’s reputation, operations, and relationships when something goes seriously wrong. Done well, it limits damage and preserves trust. Done poorly, it turns a manageable incident into a defining failure that takes years to recover from.

Most organisations don’t fail at crisis management because they lack a plan. They fail because the plan was written for a crisis that looked nothing like the one they actually faced, and nobody had practised making decisions under pressure with incomplete information and a clock running.

Why the First 24 Hours Are Different From Everything Else

There is a specific quality to the first 24 hours of a crisis that makes them unlike any other period in the response cycle. Information is partial. Stakeholders are anxious. Media and social channels are filling the vacuum with whatever they can find. And the people responsible for managing the response are often simultaneously trying to understand what happened, contain the immediate damage, and figure out what to say publicly, all at the same time.

I have been in that room more than once. Not always as the organisation in crisis, but as the agency partner being called at an inconvenient hour because something had gone wrong and a client needed to move quickly. One of the clearest lessons from those situations is that the decisions made in the first few hours tend to calcify. They become the narrative. Journalists, customers, and employees form an early impression of how the organisation is handling things, and that impression is extremely hard to shift once it sets.

The organisations that manage crises well are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated communications teams. They are the ones that have thought through the decision-making process in advance, so when the pressure is on, the framework is already there. They know who speaks, who decides, who owns the timeline, and what their non-negotiables are before anyone is in a position to ask those questions under duress.

If you want to build a stronger foundation for how your organisation handles communications under pressure, the broader PR and communications resources on The Marketing Juice cover the strategic and operational dimensions in more depth.

What Actually Happens in a Crisis (Versus What the Plan Says)

Most crisis communication plans are written in calm conditions by people imagining a tidy, sequential process. The reality is rarely sequential. Multiple things break simultaneously. The people you assumed would be available are not. The approved statement you drafted in advance turns out to be factually incomplete because the situation evolved in a direction nobody anticipated. And the stakeholder who was supposed to stay quiet gives an interview.

I have watched well-resourced organisations stumble badly in the first 24 hours not because they lacked capability, but because their crisis plan was a document rather than a decision framework. There is a meaningful difference. A document tells you what to do in a scenario. A decision framework tells you how to think when the scenario does not match the one in the document.

The specific gap I see most often is between the communication plan and the operational response. Organisations spend considerable time preparing holding statements and media protocols, but considerably less time ensuring that the people managing the communications have real-time access to accurate information from the people managing the operational response. The result is a communications team making public statements based on incomplete or stale information, which creates a second problem on top of the first.

The other thing that rarely matches the plan is the speed at which information, accurate or otherwise, spreads externally. By the time an organisation has completed its internal triage and agreed on a response, the story has often already been shaped by other voices. That does not mean the response should be rushed or careless. It means the organisation needs a faster first move, even if that first move is simply acknowledging that something has happened and that they are actively working on it.

The Acknowledgement Problem

There is a persistent instinct in organisations to say nothing until they know everything. It is understandable. Legal teams are cautious. Senior leaders want to avoid saying something that turns out to be wrong. Nobody wants to be the person who made a public statement that had to be walked back.

The problem is that silence reads as indifference. Customers, employees, and media do not interpret no comment as careful consideration. They interpret it as evasion. And once that interpretation takes hold, every subsequent communication is filtered through it.

There is a middle position that most organisations underuse: the early acknowledgement that does not overcommit. Something along the lines of acknowledging the situation, confirming that it is being taken seriously, and committing to providing a fuller update by a specific time. This does several things simultaneously. It establishes that the organisation is aware and engaged. It sets a timeline that gives the internal team space to gather accurate information. And it signals to stakeholders that communication is coming, which reduces the pressure to fill the vacuum themselves.

The critical discipline here is honouring the timeline you set. If you say you will provide an update by 6pm, the update needs to arrive by 6pm. Not 6:30. Not the following morning. If the situation has evolved and a fuller update is not yet possible, you acknowledge that and set a new timeline. The credibility of the response is built through consistency between what you say you will do and what you actually do.

Internal Alignment Before External Communication

One of the most damaging things that can happen in the first 24 hours of a crisis is for different people in the organisation to say different things publicly. It happens more often than it should, and it is almost always the result of the internal communication process being slower than the external one.

Senior leaders get calls from journalists or investors and respond before the agreed line has been circulated. Frontline staff are asked questions by customers and give their honest but unofficial view. A board member posts something on LinkedIn that is well-intentioned but inconsistent with the holding statement. Each of these individually is a minor problem. Together, they create a picture of an organisation that does not have its story straight, which raises questions about whether it has the situation under control at all.

The fix is not complicated, but it requires discipline. Before any external communication goes out, the people most likely to be contacted need to know what the agreed position is. That means employees, particularly those in customer-facing roles. It means board members and senior leaders who might be approached by media or investors. It means agency partners and suppliers who might be drawn into the story. Internal alignment is not a courtesy. It is a functional requirement for a coherent external response.

I have seen this play out in both directions. An agency I was working with had a situation where the client’s CEO gave a television interview that contradicted the statement their communications team had issued two hours earlier. Not because the CEO was being dishonest, but because nobody had briefed him on what the statement said before he went on camera. The result was a news cycle that focused entirely on the inconsistency rather than the substance of the response. A preventable problem that became the story.

When Creative Work Becomes a Crisis: Lessons From the Inside

Not every crisis originates in product failure, data breaches, or executive misconduct. Some of the most stressful situations I have managed were crises of execution, where something that was supposed to work simply did not, and the consequences were immediate and visible.

The one that stays with me most clearly involved a Christmas campaign we had developed for a major client. We had put serious work into the creative, the media plan was solid, and we had engaged a specialist consultant to handle the music licensing. Everything appeared to be in order. Then, at the eleventh hour, a rights issue emerged that made the campaign impossible to run as planned. Not a minor tweak. A fundamental problem that meant the entire concept had to be abandoned.

What followed was a compressed version of every crisis management principle I have ever read about, applied in real time with a Christmas broadcast window closing fast. We had to be honest with the client immediately, even though we did not yet have a solution. We had to hold our nerve while rebuilding the creative concept from scratch. We had to get client approval on new work under time pressure that would have been unreasonable in normal circumstances. And we had to deliver.

The thing I remember most is the conversation with the client. There was a version of that conversation where we could have been evasive, or tried to buy time before revealing the full extent of the problem. We did not do that. We called them, explained exactly what had happened, took responsibility for the situation, and told them what we were going to do next. That conversation was not comfortable. But it was the right one, and it preserved the relationship in a way that evasion would not have.

The parallel to broader crisis management is direct. Transparency with the people who are depending on you, delivered early and without qualification, is almost always the better path. It is harder in the moment. It is significantly easier to manage over time.

The Role of Social Media in the First 24 Hours

Social media has changed the crisis timeline in ways that most crisis plans still do not fully account for. The window between something happening and it being publicly visible has compressed to minutes in many cases. The expectation of organisational response has accelerated accordingly. And the channels through which a crisis can develop and spread have multiplied.

The practical implication is that social media monitoring needs to be part of the crisis response from the very first hour. Not just tracking what is being said, but understanding the velocity and sentiment of the conversation, identifying the voices that are shaping it, and making informed decisions about where and how to engage.

There is a temptation to treat social media response as a separate workstream from the main communications response. In practice, they need to be integrated. The holding statement that goes to media needs to be consistent with what is being said on social channels. The timeline you set publicly needs to be reflected in your social updates. And the tone of the social response needs to match the overall tone of the organisation’s position, rather than being handled by a community manager who is working from a different brief.

One specific discipline worth building is the distinction between acknowledging individual comments and making substantive statements. In a live crisis, the social team will be receiving a high volume of messages. The temptation is to respond to each one individually, which creates a risk of inconsistency and of making off-message statements under pressure. A cleaner approach is to have a small number of pre-approved response templates for common question types, with a clear escalation path for anything that falls outside those templates.

Understanding how audiences are forming opinions and where they are seeking information is increasingly important in crisis situations. Search behaviour has diversified significantly, and people are turning to social platforms, forums, and other channels to find information about organisations in real time. Your crisis response needs to account for where your stakeholders actually go, not just where you have traditionally communicated.

Who Should Be in the Room

Crisis response teams are often assembled in the moment, which means they frequently include people who should not be there and exclude people who should. The result is decision-making that is either too slow because too many people need to sign off, or too narrow because the right expertise is not represented.

The core crisis team should be small. Three to five people with clear roles and genuine authority to make decisions. Adding more people to the room does not improve the quality of decisions under pressure. It slows them down and diffuses accountability.

The roles that matter most in the first 24 hours are the decision-maker with authority to commit the organisation, the communications lead who owns the narrative, the legal counsel who can advise on risk without becoming a veto on every statement, and the operational lead who has real-time visibility into what is actually happening on the ground. Those four roles, working in alignment, can manage most crisis situations effectively. The problems start when legal becomes the de facto communications director, or when the operational team is not in the room and the communications team is working from assumptions.

External advisors have a place, but it is a supporting one. PR agencies and crisis consultants can bring useful perspective and additional capacity. They cannot substitute for internal clarity about who is in charge and what the organisation’s non-negotiable positions are. I have seen organisations bring in external crisis PR firms and then spend the first 12 hours briefing them rather than responding to the crisis. The external firm can only be as effective as the internal team enables them to be.

What Good Communication Actually Looks Like

There is a version of crisis communication that reads as corporate and defensive, full of passive constructions and carefully hedged language that says very little. Stakeholders are not fooled by it. They read it as an organisation prioritising legal protection over genuine accountability, and they respond accordingly.

Good crisis communication is specific, honest, and direct. It acknowledges what happened without minimising it. It takes responsibility where responsibility is warranted, rather than deflecting to external factors. It explains what is being done, not in vague terms but in concrete ones. And it commits to a timeline for further communication.

The specific test I apply to any crisis statement is whether it answers the three questions that stakeholders are actually asking. What happened? What are you doing about it? What does this mean for me? Statements that do not answer those three questions, however well-crafted they are, will leave stakeholders unsatisfied and will generate follow-up questions that put the organisation back on the defensive.

Tone matters as much as content. An organisation that sounds defensive or lawyered-up in a crisis statement is communicating something beyond the words on the page. It is communicating that it is more concerned with protecting itself than with addressing the people affected. The organisations that manage crises well tend to sound like human beings talking to other human beings, rather than legal documents addressing a risk scenario.

There is also a discipline around what you do not say. Speculation about causes before the facts are established. Premature attribution of blame. Comparisons to how other organisations have handled similar situations. Statements that implicitly minimise the impact on those affected. These are the categories of statement that tend to generate the most damaging follow-up coverage, and they are almost always avoidable with a bit of discipline in the drafting process.

The Recovery Phase and Why It Is Harder Than the Crisis Itself

The moment when the immediate crisis has passed is not the moment when the work is done. It is the moment when a different and arguably more demanding phase begins. Recovery requires an organisation to demonstrate, through sustained action over time, that the crisis was not just managed but genuinely addressed. That the changes promised were actually made. That the commitments given were honoured.

Most organisations do the first part reasonably well. They manage the acute phase, make the right statements, and get through the immediate media cycle. Where they tend to fall short is in the follow-through. The operational changes that were promised get deprioritised when the pressure is off. The stakeholder updates that were committed to become less frequent and less substantive. The sense of urgency that drove the response dissipates before the underlying issues have been resolved.

Stakeholders notice. Customers who were affected by the original incident and who were willing to give the organisation the benefit of the doubt based on its initial response will withdraw that goodwill if the follow-through does not materialise. Employees who watched how the organisation behaved in the crisis will draw conclusions about its values and its leadership that persist long after the news cycle has moved on.

The recovery plan needs to be as structured as the crisis response. Specific commitments, specific timelines, specific people accountable for delivery. And a communication cadence that keeps stakeholders informed of progress, not just at the point where something significant has changed, but at regular intervals that demonstrate ongoing commitment.

I have worked with organisations that managed the recovery phase well and those that did not. The difference was almost always whether the senior leadership maintained the same level of personal accountability in the recovery phase that they had in the acute crisis. When the CEO is still personally tracking the commitments made and the progress against them six months later, the organisation tends to deliver on them. When the crisis gets handed off to a project team and leadership moves on, the commitments tend to drift.

Preparing Before the Crisis Arrives

The organisations that handle crises best are the ones that have done serious preparation work before anything goes wrong. Not just writing a plan, but actively stress-testing it. Running scenario exercises that force decision-makers to make real choices under simulated pressure. Identifying the gaps between the plan and the reality of how the organisation actually operates. And building the relationships and communication infrastructure that will be needed in a crisis before they are urgently required.

One of the most valuable exercises I have seen organisations run is a pre-mortem on their crisis plan. Rather than asking what could go wrong, they ask what would have to be true for their current plan to fail. That question tends to surface assumptions that were never examined: that the communications director will be available, that the legal team will respond quickly, that the CEO will be reachable, that the monitoring tools will catch the issue early enough. Each of those assumptions is a potential failure point, and identifying them in advance is considerably more useful than discovering them in the middle of a live crisis.

Relationship-building with media is another element of preparation that organisations often neglect until they need it. Journalists who have a working relationship with an organisation’s communications team, who have a sense of how the organisation operates and what its values are, are more likely to give it a fair hearing in a crisis than journalists who are encountering it for the first time in a negative context. That does not mean the coverage will be favourable. It means it is more likely to be accurate and balanced.

The same principle applies to other stakeholder relationships. Customers who have a strong existing relationship with a brand are more resilient in a crisis than those who do not. Employees who trust their leadership are more likely to behave in ways that support the organisation’s response. Investors who have a clear picture of the organisation’s risk management approach are less likely to react in ways that compound the crisis. These relationships are built over time, not in the moment when they are needed.

Demand generation and brand equity work together in this way. Forrester’s work on demand creation points to the importance of sustained relationship-building with audiences rather than transactional engagement, and the same logic applies to crisis resilience. The brand equity you build in normal conditions is the buffer you draw on when things go wrong.

The Measurement Problem in Crisis Management

Crisis management is one of the areas of marketing and communications where measurement is genuinely difficult. The counterfactual, what would have happened without the response, is impossible to observe. The outcomes you care about, reputation, trust, stakeholder confidence, are slow-moving and hard to attribute to specific actions. And the metrics that are easy to measure, media coverage volume, social sentiment scores, share price movement, are proxies at best and misleading at worst.

This does not mean measurement is impossible. It means it requires a more sophisticated approach than counting press mentions or tracking a sentiment dashboard. The most useful measures tend to be qualitative: what are key stakeholders actually saying about how the organisation handled the crisis? What do employee engagement signals tell you about internal confidence in leadership? What does customer retention data look like in the months following the incident, particularly among customers who were directly affected?

There is also value in measuring process rather than just outcome. Did the crisis response team convene within the target timeframe? Was the first external communication issued within the window set in the plan? Were the internal briefings completed before the external statement went out? These process measures tell you whether the crisis management capability is functioning as designed, independent of the specific outcome in any given situation.

After any significant crisis, a structured debrief is worth more than any amount of real-time monitoring. Not a blame exercise, but a genuine examination of what the plan assumed, what actually happened, where the gaps were, and what needs to change. The organisations that improve their crisis management capability over time are the ones that treat each incident as a learning event rather than something to be closed and moved on from as quickly as possible.

Having spent time as a judge at the Effie Awards, I have seen how organisations present their crisis responses in retrospect, often in the most favourable light. The gap between the polished case study and the reality of what happened in the room is usually significant. The organisations that are honest in their internal debriefs, including about what went wrong and why, are the ones that build genuine capability over time. The ones that write the retrospective to make the response look better than it was tend to repeat the same mistakes.

A Framework for the First 24 Hours

Given everything above, it is worth being concrete about what a well-structured first 24 hours actually looks like. Not as a rigid script, because no crisis follows a script, but as a sequence of priorities that should guide the response regardless of the specific nature of the incident.

In the first hour, the priority is understanding and containment. Convene the core crisis team. Establish what is known and what is not. Identify the immediate operational priorities. Make a single decision about who speaks externally and through which channels. Issue an initial acknowledgement if the situation is already publicly visible.

In hours two through six, the priority is alignment and preparation. Brief all internal stakeholders who might be contacted externally. Prepare the substantive response based on the best available information. Set a clear timeline for the fuller update and communicate it. Begin monitoring external channels for how the story is developing.

In hours six through twelve, the priority is the fuller response. Issue the substantive statement. Proactively reach out to key stakeholders rather than waiting for them to come to you. Begin the process of addressing the operational issues that caused or contributed to the crisis. Maintain the communication cadence you committed to.

In hours twelve through twenty-four, the priority is stabilisation. Assess whether the response is landing as intended. Identify any gaps or misinterpretations that need to be addressed. Ensure the operational response is on track. Begin planning the recovery phase communication. Debrief the crisis team on how the first 24 hours went and what needs to be adjusted.

This is not a formula. It is a sequence of priorities. The specific actions within each phase will depend entirely on the nature of the crisis, the organisation’s stakeholder landscape, and the information available at each point. What matters is maintaining a clear sense of what the priority is at each stage, rather than trying to do everything simultaneously and doing none of it well.

For organisations looking to build more resilient communications infrastructure across the board, the full range of PR and communications thinking on The Marketing Juice covers everything from media relations to strategic positioning in more depth.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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