Crisis Management

Your message, your business, your life deserves a team of dedicated guardians and protectors when things get complicated to guide you back to safe and creative growth.

PR crises have a way of materializing quickly and at the worst possible moment. Whether something has happened to you or your business that is likely to attract negative media attention, or you receive a phone call from an investigative journalist, crisis PR situations can be very unsettling to say the least. At LUCID, our crisis practice focuses on swift, hands on management of PR crises. As a boutique firm, we are small enough that we make decisions very quickly, and established enough to have a national reach in dealing with even the most remote local markets.

Too many times, individuals and corporations discount the potential effect on their reputation and bottom line that can result from bad PR. For instance, many companies will make the mistake of ignoring investigative journalists from what might seem like a small media market, figuring that they can absorb the hit, and that the story would be unlikely to travel elsewhere. Unfortunately, in the age of the 24 hour news cycle, a solid local investigative story is rarely local for long, as even the smallest of markets feed their stories back to New York, where the national investigative units get a crack at them.

At LUCID, we believe the best outcome to a PR crisis is no coverage at all. We don’t believe coverage can be prevented simply by making phone calls from New York or Los Angeles. Instead, we like to be face to face with the media organization involved, as we think it humanizes us and you. Often, even if preventing the story in the first place is not possible, the tone is far more favorable once the reporter involved gets to know you.

Crisis PR is a very specialized space that many firms just don’t have the experience to play in. It requires years of trial and error, and the last thing someone in a PR crisis needs is a firm that intends on learning on the job. LUCID Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Jonathan Franks learned crisis management on the ground in Washington, D.C., first in high profile litigation, then in Congressional politics, and has experience managing crises across a variety of industries. LUCID Founder and President Ben Cooke has spent the better part of a decade navigating clients in the health care field pick up the pieces when disaster strikes.

Once a crisis is contained, we believe in immediate response via a positive PR campaign that gets the client’s positive message across, which your audience will perceive as public atonement and serves as insulation against future crisis situations.

If you are looking for help managing a crisis, please call us today. Our credentials, we frequently spend hours on the phone with potential clients outlining a strategy and providing advice in advance on being hired. We believe that the last thing someone managing a crisis needs while trying to hire a PR firm is high pressure, apocalyptic sales tactics. We pride ourselves in being nimble, and can generally get started working the same day as we are engaged so that no time is lost, and generally at dramatically lower costs than larger firms.