The First Hour of a Client Crisis: A PR Agency Plan
When a client crisis breaks, the first hour shapes the rest. A step-by-step crisis communication plan for PR agencies, before and during.
The First Hour of a Client Crisis: A PR Agency Plan
Your phone rings at 7.40am. A journalist has a story about your client running at noon. They'd like a comment. Your client's marketing director is on a flight, the CEO hasn't seen the email, and three people in your team have started drafting three different statements in a Slack thread.
What happens in the next sixty minutes will shape the whole story. And the difference between a well-handled crisis and a disaster is rarely the brilliance of the statement. It's whether you worked out who decides what before the phone rang.
Most Crises Aren't Surprises
It's tempting to think of a crisis as a bolt from the blue. The evidence says otherwise.
The Institute for Crisis Management, which has tracked crisis news for decades, reported 1,232,103 crisis news items in 2025. By its count, around 65% were "smoldering" crises rather than sudden ones: problems that were building and could have been spotted before they went public. Cybercrime led the list at about 25%, followed by mismanagement at about 19%. For that top category, the National Cyber Security Centre's incident management guidance is worth reading alongside your comms plan.
Those are the Institute's own figures, and how you categorise a crisis involves judgement. But the point holds: your client probably has a known risk that's already smouldering. That means you can prepare for it.
Before a Crisis: One Page Per Client
A long crisis manual is no use at 7.40am. For each client, you want a single page you can find in seconds:
- The crisis team: names, mobile numbers and deputies, on both sides
- Who approves: one named person at the client, plus a backup
- Legal contact: who has to see a statement before it goes out
- The spokesperson: one person, media-trained, and a backup
- Likely scenarios: three to five, specific to this client's sector
- Holding statements: a draft for each scenario, pre-agreed where possible
- Monitoring: which tools, and who's watching out of hours
- Channels: who has the logins for social accounts and the website
Check that this page is still right every quarter. People change jobs, and a crisis plan with a departed director's mobile number is worse than it looks.
The First Hour
PRSA's guide to the first hour calls this the "Golden Hour", and its steps are a useful structure: pick your team in advance, make sure people are safe, set up a command centre, prepare a holding statement and communicate internally. Here's how that can work in an agency.
Minutes 0-15: Stop and get the facts
If anyone is in danger, that comes first. Call the emergency services or the relevant authorities. No statement matters more.
Then write down what you actually know, separated into three columns: confirmed, unconfirmed and unknown. Note who told you each thing. Early facts are often wrong, and you need to know which ones you've verified.
Tell your team to stop drafting and stop commenting. Nobody responds to anyone until the process has started.
Minutes 15-30: Rate it and assemble
Agree a severity level, because it decides how far this goes:
| Level | Looks like | Response |
|---|---|---|
| Low | One complaint, limited reach | Monitor, and account lead handles |
| Medium | Spreading on social, or one outlet asking | Crisis team, holding statement ready |
| High | Major media, safety, legal or regulator involved | Client leadership and legal, now |
Open a single channel for everyone involved, such as a dedicated group chat or call. Name one person to run it and one to keep the log.
Minutes 30-60: The holding statement
A holding statement isn't your full response. It's there to show that you know about the issue and are taking it seriously, and to buy time to get the facts right.
It usually needs just four things:
- You're aware of what's happened
- Your concern, particularly for anyone affected
- What you're doing right now
- When you'll say more
Example: "We're aware of reports about [the issue] and are looking into them urgently. Our priority is [the people affected]. We'll share a further update by [time]."
Don't speculate, assign blame, guess at causes or say "no comment". Don't promise anything you can't deliver, including that update time.
Then get it approved. The client's named approver and legal need to see it before it goes anywhere. As PRSA notes, it should be prepared together with legal counsel and leadership. Move quickly, but this step doesn't get skipped. A fast, wrong statement is much harder to fix than a slightly slower right one.
Tell staff before they read about it
The client's own people should hear from the client first. Employees talk, and they're often asked directly. A short internal note, sent just before the public statement, stops rumours and tells people not to comment and where to send media queries.
The First 72 Hours
Once the statement's out, the work changes from speed to discipline.
- One voice. Only the spokesperson speaks. Everyone else refers enquiries to them.
- Keep the promises. If you said an update would come at 3pm, send one at 3pm, even if there's little new to say.
- Monitor. Track media and social for what's spreading and which facts are wrong, and correct errors directly with the outlet.
- Log everything. Every decision, approval and statement, with timestamps. You'll need this for the review, and possibly for lawyers.
- Mind your own channels. Pause scheduled posts and ads. A cheerful promotional post in the middle of a crisis can become a second story.
After It's Over
Within a week or two, hold a proper review. What did you learn, who should have been called sooner, which part of the plan didn't work? Update the one-page plan while the memory's fresh.
If the crisis was the client's fault, the review should also cover how it gets fixed. Communications can't repair an underlying problem that hasn't been dealt with.
The Honest Trade-off
No plan survives contact with a real crisis. It'll be something you didn't list, at the worst possible moment. Nobody should treat a template as a substitute for experienced judgement, and a serious crisis may need specialist crisis counsel and lawyers. If there's legal exposure, their advice comes first.
There's also a real tension between speed and accuracy. Timing guidance varies, and there's no universal rule. The honest answer is as fast as you can be while remaining true.
Be careful with AI tools here too. Drafting help is useful, but pasting confidential details of a live incident into an unapproved tool is its own risk. See is it safe to put client data in ChatGPT?
Do This Before You Need It
The best time to write this is on a quiet Tuesday. Take an hour with each major client and fill in the one-pager.
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In a crisis, you won't rise to the occasion. You'll fall back on whatever you prepared. Decide who approves what while nobody's panicking, and the first hour becomes a process rather than a scramble.
