PR Crisis Management: What to Do in the First 24 Hours

PR crisis management is the process of protecting an organisation’s reputation when something goes wrong publicly, whether that’s a product failure, an executive scandal, a social media firestorm, or an operational disaster. Done well, it limits damage and preserves trust. Done poorly, it turns a manageable problem into a defining one.

Most brands don’t fail in a crisis because the situation was unmanageable. They fail because they hesitated, communicated badly, or tried to control the narrative rather than own the truth. The first 24 hours matter more than anything that follows.

I’ve been on the agency side when campaigns have collapsed overnight, when a client’s brand has suddenly become the wrong kind of news, and when the gap between what was planned and what could actually happen closed to almost nothing. The experience of rebuilding under pressure, fast, with a client watching every decision, teaches you things about crisis communication that no framework can fully capture. I’ll come back to that.

Why Most Crisis Responses Make Things Worse

The instinct in a crisis is to protect. Protect the brand, protect leadership, protect the share price, protect the relationship with the board. That instinct, while understandable, is almost always the wrong starting point.

Organisations that lead with self-protection tend to communicate in ways that signal exactly what they’re trying to hide. The language becomes hedged and legalistic. Statements are issued that say a great deal without actually saying anything. Spokespeople are briefed to stay on message in ways that make them sound scripted rather than human. And the public, who are better at reading inauthenticity than most communications professionals give them credit for, notices immediately.

The brands that come through crises with their reputations intact, and some come through stronger than before, tend to do the opposite. They acknowledge the problem early. They communicate with genuine transparency about what happened and what they’re doing about it. They treat the public as intelligent adults rather than stakeholders to be managed.

This is not naive idealism. It’s commercially smart. Trust, once broken, is expensive to rebuild. And the cost of a poorly handled crisis compounds with every defensive statement, every evasive interview, every day that passes without a credible response.

If you want a broader grounding in how PR and communications strategy sits within a wider marketing function, the PR & Communications hub at The Marketing Juice covers the strategic landscape in more depth.

What the First 24 Hours Actually Require

The first 24 hours of a crisis are not primarily a communications challenge. They’re a decision-making challenge. Before you can say the right thing, you need to know what you’re dealing with, who needs to be involved, and what you’re actually prepared to commit to.

There are five things that need to happen in the first 24 hours, roughly in this order.

Step One: Establish What You Actually Know

The worst thing you can do in the opening hours of a crisis is communicate based on incomplete information. The second worst thing is to say nothing while you wait for perfect information that will never arrive.

The discipline required is to separate what you know from what you believe, and what you believe from what you’re speculating about. That distinction matters enormously when you start drafting statements, because anything you say publicly that later turns out to be wrong becomes its own second crisis.

Assign someone to own the information-gathering process immediately. Not a committee. One person, with authority to pull information from across the organisation and a clear deadline for an initial brief. That brief should cover: what happened, when, who is affected, what the organisation’s direct responsibility is, and what is already in the public domain.

I’ve seen crisis responses derailed because the communications team was working from a version of events that the legal team had already superseded, or because the CEO was briefed differently from the head of operations. Internal alignment on the facts is not a bureaucratic nicety. It’s the foundation of everything that follows.

Step Two: Get the Right People in the Room

Crisis response requires a small, senior, cross-functional group with actual decision-making authority. Not a working group that reports upwards. Not a communications team that has to seek sign-off for every line. A group that can move.

That group typically needs to include: the most senior communications or PR lead, a legal representative who understands the difference between legal risk and reputational risk (these are not the same thing), a senior operational lead who understands what actually happened, and an executive sponsor with the authority to approve public statements without a five-stage approval process.

The legal versus communications tension is worth addressing directly. Legal counsel will, understandably, want to minimise exposure. That often means saying less, qualifying more, and avoiding any language that could be read as an admission. Communications professionals know that this approach, while legally defensible, can be reputationally catastrophic. The organisation needs someone in the room who can hold both perspectives and make a judgment call. That is a leadership function, not a communications function.

Forrester has written about how internal-facing communications can be as strategically important as external ones. In a crisis, this is especially true. What your employees hear, and when they hear it, shapes how the organisation behaves under pressure.

Step Three: Say Something, Even If It’s Incomplete

Silence is not neutral. In the absence of a statement from the organisation, journalists, social media, and affected parties will fill the gap. They will speculate, extrapolate, and sometimes simply make things up. And once a narrative has taken hold, it is far harder to displace than it would have been to prevent.

The holding statement is one of the most underused tools in crisis communications. It doesn’t require you to have all the answers. It requires you to acknowledge that something has happened, that you take it seriously, and that you are actively working to understand and address it. That’s it. Three things. It buys you time without creating a vacuum.

A good holding statement sounds like a human being wrote it. It doesn’t contain phrases like “we are committed to the highest standards” or “we take this matter very seriously,” which have been so thoroughly drained of meaning by years of corporate misuse that they now signal the opposite of what they’re intended to convey. It says what happened, in plain English, with a genuine acknowledgment of impact, and a clear commitment to follow up when more is known.

The timeline you commit to in that holding statement matters. If you say you’ll provide an update by end of day, provide one. Even if the update is that you don’t yet have a full picture. Every commitment you keep in a crisis builds the credibility you need for when the harder statements have to be made.

Step Four: Choose Your Channels Deliberately

Where you communicate matters as much as what you say. The channel choice sends its own signal about how seriously you’re taking the situation and who you consider your primary audience to be.

A social media post is appropriate for some crises and tone-deaf for others. A press release is the right vehicle in some circumstances and feels bureaucratic and distancing in others. A direct communication to affected customers or stakeholders, before you go to the media, demonstrates a different set of priorities than leading with a statement to journalists.

The question to ask is: who is most directly affected by this situation, and what do they need to hear first? That should drive the channel sequencing. Customers before press. Employees before the public statement. Affected communities before the corporate announcement. The order in which people receive information communicates something about how the organisation values them.

Social media monitoring matters here too. You need to know what is being said, where, and by whom. Not so you can respond to every comment, but so you understand the shape of the conversation and can identify where the most damaging narratives are forming. Speed of response on social is important, but accuracy and tone matter more. A fast, defensive response on social media is worse than a considered, honest one that arrives two hours later.

Step Five: Prepare the Spokesperson, Not Just the Statement

The person who speaks for the organisation in a crisis carries the full weight of its credibility. That is not a role for whoever is most senior, or whoever is most comfortable in front of a camera, or whoever is least busy. It’s a role for whoever can communicate honestly, stay composed under pressure, and resist the urge to over-explain or get defensive.

Media training is not the same as crisis media training. A spokesperson who can handle a product launch interview will not necessarily perform well when a journalist is pressing them on why the company didn’t act sooner, or why previous statements appear to contradict the current position. Those are different skills, and they need to be developed before the crisis, not during it.

Brief the spokesperson on what they can and cannot say, but also on why. A spokesperson who understands the reasoning behind the communication strategy will handle unexpected questions better than one who has simply memorised approved lines. Journalists are good at finding the edges of a prepared brief. The spokesperson needs to be able to think, not just recite.

The Lesson I Learned About Rebuilding Under Pressure

Years ago, we were deep into production on a major Christmas campaign for Vodafone. It was a good piece of work, the kind of campaign the team was genuinely proud of. We’d worked with a Sony A&R consultant throughout the process to handle the music rights, done everything we were supposed to do. Then, at the eleventh hour, a licensing issue emerged that made the campaign impossible to run. Not a small fix. A full stop.

We had days, not weeks, to go back to the drawing board, develop an entirely new concept, get client approval, and deliver. Everything about that situation was a crisis of a particular kind: a creative and operational emergency with a hard deadline, a client who had every right to be furious, and a team that had just seen months of work evaporate overnight.

What I remember most clearly is that the quality of our communication with the client in those first hours mattered enormously. We didn’t hedge. We didn’t minimise. We told them exactly what had happened, exactly what we knew, and exactly what we were going to do about it. We committed to a timeline and we hit it. The client’s confidence in us, which could have collapsed entirely, held. Not because the situation wasn’t serious, but because we handled it like people who were in control of themselves even when the situation wasn’t in control.

That experience has shaped how I think about crisis communication ever since. The facts of a crisis are often outside your control. How you respond to them is not.

What Recovery Actually Looks Like

Recovery from a PR crisis is not about making people forget what happened. Attempts to erase or suppress a crisis tend to extend it. Recovery is about demonstrating, through consistent behaviour over time, that the organisation has genuinely changed as a result of what happened.

That means following through on every commitment made during the crisis. It means being transparent about the changes implemented, not just announcing them. It means accepting that trust is rebuilt through actions, not communications, and that the communications function’s job in the recovery phase is to make those actions visible, not to manufacture a narrative that papers over them.

It also means resisting the temptation to declare victory too early. Organisations that announce their recovery before their audiences are ready to accept it tend to trigger a second wave of criticism. The timing of recovery communications needs to be calibrated against the actual state of public sentiment, not the internal desire to move on.

Some crises, handled well, genuinely do leave organisations in a stronger position than before. Not because the crisis was a good thing, but because the response demonstrated values and capabilities that weren’t previously visible. That is a real outcome, and it’s worth understanding as a possibility rather than dismissing it as spin.

Why Preparation Is the Only Real Advantage

Every organisation that handles a crisis well has done one thing that most organisations haven’t: they’ve thought about it before it happened.

Crisis preparation doesn’t mean predicting the specific incident. It means mapping the categories of risk your organisation faces, identifying who would need to be involved in each scenario, establishing the decision-making structures that would need to activate, and rehearsing the communication process under simulated pressure.

That last part is the one most organisations skip. A crisis plan that has never been tested is a document, not a capability. The value of a simulation, even a rough one, is that it surfaces the gaps between the plan and the reality. Who actually has authority to approve a statement at 11pm on a Friday? What happens if the CEO is unreachable? Who is the backup spokesperson and have they ever been media trained? These are questions that should be answered before the crisis, not during it.

I’ve seen organisations with excellent crisis plans that had never stress-tested the approval chain, and when a real incident hit, statements were delayed for hours while people tried to work out who was actually authorised to sign off. That kind of structural failure is entirely preventable. It just requires the unglamorous work of preparation that nobody prioritises until it’s too late.

BCG’s work on decision-making under uncertainty is worth reading if you want a broader framework for how organisations can structure themselves to move faster when the stakes are high. Their research on strategic decision-making in high-pressure environments offers useful perspective on the trade-offs between speed and thoroughness.

For more on building communications strategies that hold up when the pressure is on, the PR & Communications section of The Marketing Juice covers the broader strategic context, from reputation management to media relations and beyond.

The Measurement Problem in Crisis Management

Measuring the effectiveness of a crisis response is genuinely difficult, and most organisations don’t do it well. The temptation is to track media coverage volume, sentiment scores, and social mentions, and to declare success when those metrics move in the right direction. But those metrics are a proxy for something more important, which is the actual state of trust between the organisation and its audiences.

Trust is slow to build and fast to erode. A crisis that appears to be resolved in the media can leave lasting damage in customer behaviour, employee morale, and partner confidence that doesn’t show up in a media monitoring dashboard. The organisations that recover most effectively tend to track behavioural indicators alongside sentiment: customer retention, employee engagement scores, partner renewal rates, sales conversion rates in the affected category. These tell you whether the recovery is real or cosmetic.

The honest answer is that some crises leave a permanent mark, and pretending otherwise is a disservice to the leadership teams trying to manage them. The goal is not to return to exactly where you were before. It’s to find a new stable position that is commercially and reputationally viable, and to build from there.

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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