- Situation
- A regional site reports that a battery installation at a hospital failed during a blackout. The installation worked. The reporter used a photo of a different site.
- What we do
- Within the first hour the company published a holding statement, sent the reporter the timestamped operating log and offered the hospital's facilities manager as a second source.
- Outcome
- The correction runs the same afternoon and the story never reaches national desks. Illustrative scenario, not a client case.
Crisis communications agency
A crisis communications agency prepares a company to speak clearly when something goes wrong, then runs the response when it does.
Most of the value sits before the event.
Who owns each scenario and who speaks gets settled in a quiet week, so the first hour of a real incident goes on facts instead of on an argument about the microphone.
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How crises actually start
- 75%of crisis news stories in 2024 grew from slow internal problems, not sudden eventscrisisconsultant.com
- 21.5%of 2024 crisis stories were about mismanagement, the largest single categorycrisisconsultant.com
- 69%of business leaders in a 2019 PwC survey had lived through a corporate crisis in the previous five yearspwc.com
What is crisis communications
Crisis communications is the part of PR that handles events threatening trust in an organisation, from a data breach to a false story or an arrested executive.
The people affected need to hear something, often before reporters do. The CDC rule applies to an outage as well as an outbreak.
Be first, be right, be credible.
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What are the main types of crisis
Sort crises by how they start, because the start decides your warning time.
The Institute for Crisis Management classed three quarters of 1.1 million crisis stories in 2024 as smoldering.
Those problems sat in complaint logs for months before anyone wrote about them.
- Sudden. Accident, fire, cyberattack. No warning.
- Smoldering. Mismanagement, a whistleblower, a class action. Weeks to years of warning.
- Operational. Outage, recall, missed deliveries at scale. Minutes to hours.
- Misinformation. A fake document or hostile campaign. Hours.
- Leadership. Misconduct, a sudden exit, a public remark. Varies.
What does a crisis PR firm do
A crisis firm does four jobs, in this order. Online reputation management is a different trade that works on reviews and search results.
A crisis team works on what reporters print and what the people affected hear.
Readiness
Scenarios, an owner per scenario, the approval chain, draft holding statements.
Training
A spokesperson and a deputy prepared for hostile interviews.
Response
Statements and reporter calls, with staff hearing the same message as the press.
Recovery
Follow-up coverage, corrections, a review of what worked.
What to do in the first hour of a crisis
The first hour decides whether you lead the story or chase it. This checklist is for whoever takes the first call.
Log every statement with the time and the speaker, because a reporter will later ask why the second one differs.
- Minute 0 to 10. Confirm with a witness. Note time, source, unknowns.
- Minute 10 to 20. Call the owner and approver, or their deputies.
- Minute 20 to 30. Pause everything scheduled to go out. A cheerful product post at minute 25 becomes its own story.
- Minute 30 to 45. Publish the holding statement and send it to staff first.
- Minute 45 to 60. Give reporters the same statement and the next update time.
Copy and send
What should a holding statement include
A holding statement is the first public reply, issued before the facts are complete. It tells people the company knows and is acting.
Keep it under 100 words and never guess at the cause. The five parts below come with sample lines for an outage.
Holding statement, payment outage Acknowledge what happened, in one plain sentence. Our payment service has been unavailable since 09.40 today. Care. Say who is affected and that you take it seriously. We know merchants cannot take card payments and we are sorry for the disruption. Action. Say what you are doing right now. Our engineers have isolated the cause and are restoring service region by region. Guidance. Say what people should do. Merchants can accept bank transfers through the dashboard in the meantime. Next update. Say when you will speak again and where. We will post the next update on our status page at 11.00.
Who should be the spokesperson in a crisis
Pick the spokesperson by credibility on the issue, not by title.
A chief executive fits a leadership crisis or a fatal accident, a technical lead often fits an outage.
Everyone else gets one line pointing to the named spokesperson.
Give the spokesperson and the deputy one page of messages and hard questions, laid out in the press kit guide.
- Key message in the first 20 seconds, and once more at the end.
- Answer, then bridge to the fact people need.
- If you do not know, say when you will.
- Never say no comment.
- Nothing off the record.
- Match the tone to the harm.
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How often to monitor media during a crisis
Monitoring during an incident runs on a fixed clock, not on anxiety.
The last step matters because AI answers repeat an uncorrected error long after the news cycle, and only fixing the source article stops it.
First 6 hours, every 15 minutes
News sites and social posts, plus replies from reporters.
Day 1 to 3, every hour
National and trade media first, then forums.
Week 1 to 2, twice a day
Follow-up stories, and whether the corrections you asked for actually ran.
After, weekly for a month
What the AI assistants say when someone asks about the event.
Crisis work in defense and energy
Defense and energy companies carry an extra constraint.
Every public word must keep citizens and customers informed while giving an opponent nothing usable and breaking no contract clause.
Pocket PR does this work from Kyiv and Brno, for companies that face Ukrainian and EU press as well as UK and US desks.
Our lead expert ran the communications strategy of Octava Defence, a cybersecurity operator, from 2018 to 2021, and since 2025 has led communications for the Ukrainian Council of Defence Industry, as listed on her LinkedIn profile.
In that work a statement is checked for what it reveals before anyone checks its tone. Three habits handle the tension.
- Clear every statement with legal and security in one review, not in sequence.
- Prepare a separate version for government stakeholders, who learn details the press cannot print.
- Decide in advance which facts will never be confirmed, and decline them the same way every time.
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How much does a crisis communications agency cost
Readiness work is a fixed project with a known end. Live response is billed by the hour or day, because nobody knows its length.
A June 2026 guide on PR consultant rates puts US crisis specialists at $200 to $500 an hour and live response at $2,000 to $10,000 a day.
Crisis readiness is part of the Pocket PR Scale plan, from $1,490 a month, or start with our crisis communication plan template.
From quiet week drill to live desk
Readiness before the story breaks
We map your likeliest crisis types, name one owner for each and write the holding statements while nobody is under pressure.
Spokesperson drill
Your spokesperson answers the ten hardest questions on camera, twice, until the key line comes out the same way every time.
Live desk during an incident
We check press coverage and AI answers on a fixed clock. Every update is drafted here, and the log shows who said what at which hour.
A false outage story about a power storage startup
Anastasiia Bratkova
Chief Brand, Marketing & Communications Officer, RSE
Signs every pitch
Questions
What founders ask about crisis PR firms
What is crisis communications?
It is how an organisation keeps its own people and the public informed when an event threatens its reputation. The roles and first messages are agreed before anything happens.
What is a PR nightmare?
A story that spreads faster than the company can answer it. Silence or a wrong first fact usually does more harm than the event itself.
What are some common PR fails?
Hours of silence is the classic one. Close behind is a guessed fact that changes by evening, which makes every later statement look unreliable.
How much does a crisis PR firm cost?
Independent crisis specialists in the US bill $200 to $500 an hour, and live crisis response is often priced by the day. Readiness work costs far less than response.
Do you remove negative reviews or search results?
No. That is online reputation management, a separate trade. We correct facts with reporters and speak for you in public.
Next step
Talk to the team
Defense, energy and large programs. A mutual NDA before any confidential brief.