Davies Public Affairs

Davies Public Affairs has been named Crisis Communications Firm of the Year, a recognition that reflects the firm’s work helping organizations avoid crises, prepare for them and manage them when they hit.

CEO and Chairman John Davies said the award is less about clever messaging and more about discipline under pressure, starting with basic decisions that many organizations have not made before an incident occurs.

“The biggest thing is who’s going to speak, who’s in charge and how do we get a message out quickly and honestly,” Davies said.

Davies described the firm’s crisis work as a three-part model: prevention, preparation and response. The prevention piece often looks like community engagement and early listening for clients developing projects that can trigger fear or organized opposition. Davies said the goal is to keep a situation from becoming a crisis in the first place by making a strong first impression and building relationships before a controversy hardens.

Preparation is built around plans that are intentionally simple. Davies said a plan must define what a crisis is, identify triggers and clarify roles, approvals and escalation so the organization can move fast without guessing. “The plans don’t need to be elaborate,” he said, adding that they need to be “simple and actionable.”

The third stage is hands-on crisis management. That work includes media response and statement development, but Davies said the real test is staying clear-eyed about audiences and the facts, especially when clients are tempted to overreact or freeze.

One common pitfall is a leadership circle that cannot or will not level with decision-makers, Davies said. In many situations, the first job is telling clients what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

The second pitfall is timing. Davies said some clients want to put out a statement immediately, while others are paralyzed and do nothing. The firm evaluates the media and community landscape before speaking when the situation allows it but pushes immediate acknowledgment when there is a hazard or public safety dimension.

You need to invite the media in the front door and have a relationship,” Davies said, arguing that a vacuum will be filled quickly by rumor, speculation and opportunistic sources.

Several recent engagements illustrate the approach.

In one case involving a renewable energy project, a client faced accusations that siting decisions amounted to environmental injustice. Davies said the firm worked to understand the claim, and then shifted the effort toward real community concerns and a path to credibility. By listening, engaging and helping the client respond in a way that residents could see and verify, the firm helped convert a hostile narrative into a story about a company adjusting its approach based on local feedback. Davies said the change was visible in subsequent coverage and in what people found when they searched for the project.

In another case, an oil company woke up to a leak that had been ongoing for two days on California’s coast, with media and onlookers converging quickly. Davies said prior crisis training, even a rudimentary plan and a ready spokesperson helped the company regain control of the environment. The team moved the press to a controlled site and put forward a credible on-scene voice that could provide updates without speculation. Davies said post-incident research showed the response improved public perceptions and built trust instead of eroding it.

Senior Vice President John Horstman said that results like those come from treating crisis communications as a multi-stakeholder exercise, not a media-only project. “We have to tailor our message and think about the message as it relates to investors, as it relates to the community, state government, federal government, national media and local media,” he said.

Horstman also emphasized the firm’s close integration with legal teams, describing crisis communications as a parallel discipline that operates alongside legal strategy rather than downstream from it. “In more than half of our new crisis engagements, we are working directly with attorneys as part of the response team,” Horstman said. “Our role is to make sure the communications strategy reinforces the legal approach, protects the client’s position and avoids creating new risk while the facts are still developing.”

Looking ahead, Davies said the firm is applying the same research-led approach to emerging sectors that are drawing heightened scrutiny, including AI data centers, micro-nuclear projects and other infrastructure tied to rising electricity demand. The firm’s view is that opposition often starts with mismatched assumptions about what people fear. Qualitative interviews, not just polling, help identify whether the flashpoint is water use, traffic, scale or something else entirely, then shape a values-based message that speaks to those concerns directly.

For John Davies, the award lands as a validation of basics executed consistently: tell the truth, choose the right messenger, understand the audience and act with intent. The firm’s aim, he said, is not simply to survive a news cycle, but to come out of the crisis “better than what they went in with.”