A phone call at 22.40 on a Saturday
A client's operations director rings the agency's out-of-hours number. There has been a fire at a warehouse, nobody is hurt, and a local reporter is already outside. The duty account manager opens the crisis manual PDF for that client. It lists seven people to contact on the client side and five at the agency. The head of communications named in it left in the spring. The legal contact's mobile goes to a stranger's voicemail. The agency's crisis lead is on a flight.
Forty minutes later the account manager has reached three people, left messages for four, and is not sure who, if anyone, is authorised to approve a statement. The reporter's piece goes live with a line saying the company did not respond.
Why the tree is always out of date
- Crisis manuals are written at onboarding and reviewed rarely, if at all.
- People change jobs, phone numbers and holidays faster than documents are updated.
- Nobody tests the tree until the night it is needed.
- The tree says who to call but not who has been reached, so several people ring the same person.
- There is no rule for what happens when the first contact does not pick up.
The manual is usually thoughtful about roles and decisions. The failure is the contact detail and the mechanics of reaching people fast.
What a slow call-down costs
The first hour decides a lot of how a story is told. A statement that arrives after the first piece is published is responding to that piece, not framing the incident. Internally, a messy call-down means people learn about the crisis from social media, the wrong person approves something, and the client questions the agency's grip in the exact moment it needs to trust it.
How we build a live contact tree
- Each client has a tree of roles, not just names: decision maker, approver, legal, operations lead, agency lead, agency duty manager.
- Each role has a primary and backup person, with numbers and a rota for out-of-hours cover, kept in one place the agency and client both update.
- Contacts are asked to confirm their details at intervals you set, by text or email, and unconfirmed entries are flagged to the account lead.
- When a crisis is declared, one button starts the call-down. Each person gets a text and a call through a service such as Twilio, and is asked to reply with a short code to confirm.
- A live screen shows who has confirmed, who has not, and who is next. If the primary for a role has not confirmed after a set time, the backup is contacted automatically.
- Everyone who confirms is sent the bridge line or Teams link and the incident record.
| Role | Primary | Backup | Escalate after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decision maker | Client CEO | Managing director | Short interval you set |
| Statement approver | Head of communications | Marketing director | Short interval you set |
| Legal | General counsel | External solicitor | Longer interval you set |
| Agency lead | Crisis director | Account director | Short interval you set |
| Duty manager | On-call rota | Second on rota | Short interval you set |
A dry run can be scheduled quarterly, sending a test message that people confirm, so the tree is checked without waiting for a real incident.
The same Saturday night, rebuilt
The duty account manager declares a crisis for the client on her phone. Within minutes, texts and calls go to every role. The head of communications confirms. The legal primary does not, so the backup, the external solicitor, is called automatically and confirms. The screen shows her who is on the bridge and who is still being tried.
Within the first half hour the approver, legal and the agency crisis lead are talking, and a holding line is with the reporter before the first piece is published.
Is your crisis manual like this?
- The contact list is inside a PDF or slide deck.
- Nobody can say when the numbers were last checked.
- The tree has never been tested out of hours.
- There is no automatic backup when someone does not answer.
- People ring the same contact because nobody knows who has been reached.