How to Choose a Crisis PR Firm: Questions, Red Flags and Fit
What crisis PR firms actually do, when you need one, the questions to ask before you hire, the red flags to walk away from, and how to work with a firm once it is on board.
By Editorial Team
7 min read
To choose a crisis PR firm, look for people who have handled situations like yours, who will staff your account with senior practitioners rather than juniors, who work well alongside your lawyers, and who tell you honestly what they can’t control. Ask for a clear scope, a named team, how they bill and how fast they respond out of hours. Walk away from any firm that promises to make a story disappear, guarantees coverage or suggests fake reviews or anonymous attacks on critics.
This guide explains what crisis PR firms do, when it makes sense to hire one, how to evaluate them and how to work with one once you have. It doesn’t name or rank firms; the right choice depends on your situation.
What crisis PR firms actually do
A crisis communications firm helps an organization decide what to say, to whom, when and through which channels during a situation that threatens its reputation. The work usually includes some combination of:
- Strategy and counsel: assessing the situation, advising leadership on the response and anticipating how the story could develop.
- Messaging: drafting holding statements, press statements, customer notices, employee memos and Q&A documents.
- Media relations: handling reporter inquiries, preparing spokespeople and, sometimes, arranging interviews.
- Monitoring: tracking news, social media and online discussion so the team can see how the story is moving.
- Spokesperson preparation: intensive media training before interviews or press conferences.
- Stakeholder communication: helping plan messages for employees, customers, investors and partners. See our guide to stakeholder communication in a crisis.
- Preparedness work: writing plans, running tabletop drills and training teams before anything goes wrong.
What they generally don’t do is make negative content vanish. Removing or pushing down search results, handling reviews and repairing what people find online over months is closer to reputation management work. Our guide to reputation management vs PR explains the difference, and many serious situations need both.
When you need a crisis PR firm, and when you don’t
Not every bad week needs outside help. A single negative review, a local complaint or a short outage can usually be handled by a well-prepared internal team. Consider a firm when:
- National or trade media are covering the story, or are likely to.
- The issue involves injury, death, criminal allegations, regulators or litigation.
- A senior leader’s conduct is at the center of the story.
- Nobody on your team has handled a public crisis before.
- The situation will run for weeks, such as a recall, investigation or trial.
- Your internal team is too close to the issue, or part of it.
The best time to find a firm is before you need one. Choosing under pressure, at night, from a search result, is how organizations end up with the wrong partner. Many firms offer preparedness work or an on-call arrangement so the relationship already exists when something happens.
Questions to ask before you hire
Treat the first conversation as an interview in both directions. Good firms will ask you hard questions too.
Experience and fit
- What situations similar to ours have you handled? (Expect them to describe the type of work without naming confidential clients.)
- Do you have experience in our industry and with our regulators?
- Have you worked on matters with active litigation, and how do you work with outside counsel?
- What would you advise us to do in the next 24 hours, and why?
The team
- Who exactly will work on our account day to day, and how senior are they?
- Will the people in this meeting be the people answering the phone at 11 p.m.?
- What happens if our lead is unavailable?
- How quickly do you respond out of hours, and how?
Scope and billing
- What is included, and what counts as extra work?
- How do you bill: hourly, a monthly retainer, a fixed project fee or a combination? Can we set a budget cap with approval for anything above it?
- How do you report on work done and time spent?
- What are the terms for ending the engagement?
Honesty and limits
- What can’t you do for us?
- How would you measure whether the engagement is working?
- Would you ever advise us to say nothing, and when?
Listen to how they answer the last group. A firm that says plainly what is outside its control is usually more trustworthy than one with an answer for everything.
Red flags
- Guaranteed outcomes. No firm can promise that a story will be dropped, that coverage will be positive or that search results will change by a certain date.
- Offers to plant fake reviews, comments or accounts. Fake reviews are banned under the FTC’s 2024 rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, and sockpuppet campaigns tend to be discovered and become a second, worse story.
- Aggressive tactics against critics. Legal threats as a first move, attacks on reporters or efforts to dig up personal dirt usually escalate the situation.
- Bait and switch staffing. Senior people in the pitch, juniors on the work.
- Refusing to work with your lawyers, or advising you to ignore legal advice.
- Vague scope and open-ended billing with no reporting.
- Boasting about confidential clients, which suggests they will talk about you too.
- Pressure to sign immediately. Urgency is real in a crisis, but a good firm can start on a short initial engagement while you agree longer terms.
Our guide on choosing a reputation management company covers similar warning signs on the online side.
Not sure where to start?
Get a free audit of your search results and review profiles, with a prioritized fix list.
Get a free auditHow to compare firms side by side
If you have time to speak to two or three firms, compare them on the same points rather than on who gave the best presentation.
| Criterion | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Relevant experience | Can describe comparable situations and the choices they made |
| Named team | Specific senior people committed to your account, with backups |
| First-day plan | A clear, sensible view of the next 24 to 48 hours |
| Legal coordination | Comfortable working through or alongside counsel |
| Honesty about limits | Says plainly what it can’t control |
| Availability | Out-of-hours contact and response times written into the agreement |
| Clear terms | Written scope, billing method, reporting and exit terms |
A worked example
This is an illustrative scenario, not a real client. A family-owned chain of fitness studios learns that a former employee has filed a lawsuit alleging harassment by a manager, and a local newspaper is preparing a story. The owners have never dealt with the media.
Their lawyer suggests speaking to two firms that day. The first opens with a confident promise that it can “keep the story out of the paper” and proposes posting positive comments under the article from members’ accounts. The second asks detailed questions, explains that the story will probably run, and proposes a short statement agreed with counsel, a message to staff and members before publication, and interview preparation for the owner in case the paper asks for one. It names the two people who will do the work and offers a short initial engagement with a budget cap.
The owners choose the second firm. The story runs, quotes the statement accurately and does not grow. The fake-comments plan from the first firm would have risked breaking the FTC rule and turning a local story into a much bigger one.
Working with a crisis PR firm
- Tell them everything, early. A firm can only protect you from facts it knows about. Surprises later undermine every statement.
- Keep one decision-maker on your side. The firm advises; your leader decides. See our guide to the crisis team.
- Put the firm and your lawyers in the same room. Legal and communications advice should be reconciled before a statement is drafted, not after.
- Agree on what success means. Accurate coverage, calmer customers, retained staff and a story that closes are realistic goals. “No coverage at all” usually isn’t.
- Plan the handover. When the acute phase ends, decide who owns monitoring, reviews and search results. If that work falls to you, our online reputation crisis management service focuses on that longer online recovery.
Frequently asked questions
What does a crisis PR firm do?
It advises leadership on how to respond, drafts statements and messages for each audience, handles media inquiries, prepares spokespeople, monitors coverage and online discussion, and helps organizations prepare before a crisis with plans and training.
How do crisis PR firms charge?
Commonly by the hour, through a monthly retainer, with a fixed project fee, or a mix of these. Costs depend on the scale of the situation, how long it lasts and how senior the team is. Ask for a written scope, a billing method and a budget cap.
Can a crisis PR firm stop a negative story from running?
Generally no, and be wary of any firm that promises to. A good firm can make sure your side is represented accurately, correct factual errors and help the story close sooner, but editorial decisions belong to the publication.
Should we hire a crisis PR firm or a reputation management company?
It depends on the problem. For live media attention and statements, a crisis communications firm is usually the right fit. For negative search results, reviews and long-term online recovery, reputation management is closer to the need. Serious situations often call for both, working together.
