By Katie Paine / April 30, 2025

For nearly two decades, I wrote a column on crisis response for PR News. In the early days, I’d have to search really hard to find a juicy crisis to write about. Then I set up Google Alerts to let me know every time the terms “PR nightmare,” “PR crisis,” “PR headache,” or “PR debacle” appeared anywhere. Now I have the luxury of picking and choosing among a cornucopia of corporate screw-ups. Thanks to social media and a bunch of really foolish, arrogant, or narcissistic CEOs, I’m never lacking in material.

And no matter how many columns I write and how much advice I give, the following week teaches me that the world still needs a lot more educating on how to handle a crisis. Let’s face it, most organizations are just one dumb tweet away from becoming a laughing stock on BuzzFeed. Never mind that in these chaotic political times, you have no idea what crisis might hit your industry or from where.

Which is why we’ve gathered all our crisis advice into one place in this edition of The Measurement Advisor ono How to prepare for them, how to avoid them, how to use measurement to end one faster, and much more:

• Learn the ABCs of Managing and Surviving a CrisisI
• ’Here you’ll find out what I’ve learned from analyzing 17 years of crises for my “Image Patrol” column
• Read this to Calculate the ROI of Avoiding a Crisis
• Learn how AI can help in a crisis
• Follow this Crisis Preparedness Checklist and you’ll be ready for anything..
• And best of all: How to avoid a crisis in the first place

If you are just starting to get crisis management under your belt, the good news is that there’s lots of great material out there. This slideshow by leading crisis expert Dr. Timothy Coombs is a great place to start. Then read this case study of why measurement is critical in a crisis…

I was speaking to a national nonprofit organization one day when the Public Affairs manager asked me, “How do you measure the negative stuff, the crises?” I rambled on for a bit about tracking the share of negatives in an industry like defense or oil, where everyone gets negative press all the time. But the manager pointed out that since his organization was a nonprofit, thus not subject to a lot of criticism, their strategy had to be different.

So I asked him to describe the crisis he had in mind. It seems he’d put together a stunt involving a water buffalo and late-night comedian Conan O’Brien. The plan was for Conan to ride the water buffalo, but the water buffalo had other ideas and threw Conan to the floor. The next day Conan—a guy who knows how to make the best of a difficult situation—made a point of dropping by to show off his bruises and describing the adventure of how he got them.

But what, I asked was the impact on the organization? The PR manager didn’t know. So I asked their digital analytics guru, who happened to also be in the room, to check her web analytics for the night of and the two days after the Conan episode. As it turns out, traffic to their website, signups to their newsletters, and donations to their organization, all those measures had increased dramatically.

The crisis was actually a victory. That’s the value of measurement in a crisis. ∞