How should your nonprofit approach crisis communications?

This episode includes discussion of sensitive topics, including suicide, sex trafficking, and school shootings in relation to crisis communications. Please take care while listening, and feel free to skip or step away if you need to.

Farra Trompeter: Welcome to the Smart Communications Podcast. This is Farra Trompeter, co-director and worker-owner at Big Duck. Today, we’re going to ask the question, how should your nonprofit approach crisis communications? I am delighted to be joined by Joanna Brody, who actually offered a tip in a recent blog post we had called Managing your nonprofit’s approach to crisis communications. That blog went live in late March, which is, incidentally, when we are recording this conversation. And I asked Joanna, I appreciated her tip in that post, and asked her if she would join us on the podcast. So Joanna Brody uses she/her pronouns and is the founder and president of Brody PR: Strategy and storytelling for social good, which she started in 1994 (coincidentally, the same time Big Duck got started). She has promoted everything from trashed trees to royal treasures. In addition to her general PR work, she has managed multiple crisis situations for a variety of clients, addressing natural disasters, leadership death and scandals, picket lines, smear campaigns, 9/11, and Covid. Joanna, welcome to the show.

Joanna Brody: Thank you, I’m delighted to be here.

Farra Trompeter: Well, before we talk about the communications part of crisis communications, let’s start with the crisis part of it all. How do you define crisis when we’re thinking about crisis communications?

Joanna Brody: A crisis is something that happens to or within an organization that is unexpected or out of the ordinary, something unpleasant and uncomfortable, and that could possibly damage an organization or an individual’s reputation, or interrupt the organization’s operations. So there’s basically two kinds of crises: Reputational crises that generally happen within an organization. So, for example, a leadership scandal or a smear campaign, a death in amongst your employees or leadership, a violation of some sort. I had a client in which one of the partners died by suicide. I had another client where the executive director was accused of sexual harassment, and another where the head of the organization was embezzling and bullying people into resigning. So those, if you can see, would all be things that would affect an organization’s reputation, right? It’s not always that dramatic. I’ve worked crises in which the head of an organization is being forced out by the board, and they wanted to offer him a graceful exit as well as prep the stakeholders for a smooth change of leadership.

Joanna Brody: External crises happen outside of you or your organization, but may affect you in some way. So, of course, the pandemic is a very recent example that I would venture to say affected absolutely everyone. The potential loss of federal funding is something very current that is happening amongst many nonprofits. The recent wildfires in Los Angeles, where I am, is something an external crisis that happened to many organizations. In fact, in the recent fires, I have a school client that lost one of their campuses, and I have another client that has an affiliation with a nonprofit that is the recipient of federal funding, and they’re having to figure out how they’re gonna manage that from a crisis communication standpoint.

Farra Trompeter: Very helpful. So again, reputational and external, and I’m sure we’ll come back to those in our conversation today. Let’s talk about when that thing happens. You know, sometimes, like you said, it can be very dramatic, it can be very upsetting, it can be very uncomfortable, it could be damaging. How do nonprofit staff identify whether something is or is not a crisis to begin with? And once they do identify that it’s a crisis, what’s the first step they take when they’re thinking about, “Okay, I’ve got a crisis, now I need to figure out how to communicate around it.”

Joanna Brody: A crisis is something that is particularly unpleasant or challenging, or as I said before, disruptive, that’s happening to or within your organization. So, do you anticipate that people will be upset or people will respond negatively somehow? And it could be something as simple as a power outage at a school, which could be considered a crisis because you need to communicate with, you know, the students and the staff and the families very quickly, letting them know there’s something at the school we need to inform you about. You know and, and so that’s a very small crisis, but it disrupts day-to-day operations. And then there’s, there’s of course, some of the larger ones that I referenced before. And also a crisis is defined as anything that will draw an extraordinary amount of attention to the organization. And the first step is to just pause and take a look at what’s going on. Don’t leap into action until you have a full assessment of what the situation is. And actually, I shouldn’t say full assessment because you don’t always know exactly what’s going to be happening, but take a few minutes to assess the situation, talk to your leadership, and figure out what your next steps are.

Farra Trompeter: That makes sense. Well, at Big Duck, we don’t provide PR or crisis comms, but we often hear about reputational concerns since we do a lot of work related to branding. In these cases, there’s often a bit of a tug of war between what the communications team thinks an organization should do and what the legal team might advise. I’m curious, how has that tension between comms and legal shown up in your work, and how do you navigate that?

Joanna Brody: Lawyers and communication professionals are both extremely important components of managing a crisis. And yes, they can be at odds, but it’s very important that they actually collaborate with each other and have respect for each other. So the legal team their job is to keep their client out of legal trouble, and their tendency is to say nothing or to say as absolutely little as possible. Whereas the communications people are out there saying, you’ve got to say something because if we don’t say something, that’s gonna be an indication that you’re guilty of something, the public is gonna wonder, they’re gonna fill the void of communication with bad information and rumors and et cetera, et cetera. So working hand in hand between legal and communications is very important, and they must respect each other and they must work very, very closely together.

Joanna Brody: And I will give you a very recent example. I had a nonprofit client who was the victim of a smear campaign, an online smear campaign. And eventually, this smear campaign made its way to a large media outlet that was going to be doing a story. And the client was contacted. Me, as a communications advisor and a lawyer, got involved, and we managed the interview process with this media outlet word-by-word-by-word. So the lawyer’s tendency may have been to say, “You can’t talk and we don’t want you to get into a situation where you are gonna be liable for what you say.” But my job as a communications person is to say, “We’ve got to tell your side of the story.” So we worked extremely closely with each other, and I’m happy to say at this point that we were actually successful in killing the story.

Joanna Brody: The other legal issues that crop up also are, I was working with an organization, a YMCA actually, that was trying to expand their facility and there were some access issues with the driveway that led into a very exclusive community that was part, you know, that was near the facility and the community was worried it was going to impact them or impede their ability to get in and out of the neighborhood. But the YMCA had entitlement to this driveway. So there was actually a dispute going on. The legal team for the YMCA sent out some legal notices to the community members explaining what was happening, telling them that they wouldn’t win a lawsuit, trying to establish good rapport. It was a two-page letter that contained so much legalese that it was practically not understandable to the average person. And I spent five plus hours just editing this thing into plain English so that the neighbors would know what was being communicated to them. So that’s a flip-side of legal and comms working together.

Farra Trompeter: Helpful, helpful. Well, let’s keep on the communications part of all of this and offer some tangible tips for our listeners. What goes into a crisis communications plan? Can you actually break down some of the common elements or approaches you take when you’re working with organizations in these and other situations?

Joanna Brody: Sure. So you asked in an earlier question, what’s the first thing that you do? And that is the first tip on the crisis communications plan is assess the situation. So you want to quickly understand the scope and the impact of the crisis. Consult your internal team and gather as many facts are as available to you at that moment in time. Then you want to start developing some key messages, and you want them to be clear and concise, and empathetic. If there’s some sort of tragedy that’s happening or you know, something that’s negatively affecting the organization or some outsiders of the organization, address the issue, what’s being done to fix it, and what the stakeholders can expect.

Joanna Brody: And there’s different audiences for each of these things. You want to address your internal audience first, which includes your staff, your board members, some other stakeholders that need to hear about these things before they go public. So you don’t want your employees to hear about some crisis through the media or by reading about it on your website or in social media when you haven’t actually shared with them what’s going on. And then you’ve got your external audiences, which would be the media and some other people who may have an interest in your organization but aren’t necessarily involved on a day-to-day basis.

Joanna Brody: And that’s when you bring in, you know, social media posts, posting on your website, preparing a public statement, and addressing the facts, the emotions, and demonstrating commitment to resolving the issue. And then you’d want to monitor, monitor what’s going on. Some things require an additional response, some things don’t. And you wanna provide ongoing updates. So you keep your stakeholders informed regularly as a crisis evolves and resolves. And I want to emphasize some things that you never do in a crisis. You never lie, never speculate, and never get aggressive or defensive.

Farra Trompeter: Generally, things we should always avoid, but good reminders.

Joanna Brody: It is absolutely true, but it is even more true in a crisis. And especially the aggressive defensive, I don’t believe in that, even though some people might want to take a very hard line. But what happens there is if you get very defensive (and I can give you plenty of examples of that), that often becomes the headline news, right, is your response.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, that’s helpful. And just to recap the steps, because I think those were great: Assess the situation; develop key messages; first focus on internal communication; then external communication; then monitor the media and social media; and then throughout the process, provide ongoing updates. So, thank you for that. That’s very helpful. I was trying to come up with a catchy acronym on the fly, but I couldn’t quite do it. I’ll have to work on that later.

Joanna Brody: I’ll work on that. I’ll work on that.

Farra Trompeter: Well, I’ve heard you and other crisis communicators recommend the value of preparing to get ahead of any crisis that may come in the future. Are there steps someone can take to best prepare while also acknowledging there can be a lot of unexpected curveballs that show up and that most crises can’t be predicted?

Joanna Brody: Yeah, I’m gonna take issue with that: Most crises can’t be predicted, which is a common misunderstanding. Many, many, many scenarios of what might happen can absolutely be predicted. And let’s just take for an example, a school. Some of the obvious crises that a school may have to deal with: school shootings; a teacher accused of misconduct with a student; student protests, very popular thing these days; budget deficits; personnel layoffs; a school closure for anything like a heat wave or a snow day or earthquake or floods depending on where you live. So there are many, many, many scenarios that can be predicted and can be prepared for. And sure, there are certainly cases of something that you never dreamed possible pops up. And for example, 9/11 is one, of course, COVID is one, even though people had some time to prepare for it as it was embarking.

Joanna Brody: The thing to do in these situations is to have some simple holding statements available that are pretty generic and overarching and can be used in any situation. Again, going back to the school scenario. Let’s, let’s say that you just, you know, one of your holding statements, “Our first concern is safety of students and staff”, or “We are looking into things and we’ll keep you apprised,” or “We are fully cooperating with the authorities or the investigation”. So, these sound very generic and very simple, but just to have those things kind of on the shelf and ready to go, what that does is it also buys your organization time to figure out what your next steps are. Because when a crisis does hit, depending on the severity of it, you are going to be barraged. And having these holding statements available at least gives people peace of mind that you know, something’s happening, you are working on it. Give them confidence that you will give them information as you get it, and you are working on resolving the issue.

Joanna Brody: Some of the other things to think about are: Who talks? Who doesn’t? How are media calls handled? Because that’s another thing for a large, a big crisis, the media is going to start calling immediately, and I’m sure you’re all aware of that, and your receptionist needs to know how to handle that. Anybody that might receive a media call needs to know what to do with that, which is generally they pass it on. Say, “I can’t talk to you, but please call the CEO or the superintendent, or the executive director, or they will get back to you.” And then some of the other things to think about are what channels of communication you have available: your website, emails, text chains, social media, live debriefings, media announcements, prepared statements, and things like that. So all of these things can be, in some fashion, prepared ahead of time. And I also like to talk about the fact that there are crises that you prepare for but never see the light of day, which are, you know, yippee!

Farra Trompeter: Hopefully. A lot of the scenarios you laid out, I was like, “Oh God.” I don’t like to think about any of those, but I appreciate it, and we need to think about it.

Joanna Brody: Exactly. I mean, I’ll give you two examples from my client base. I had an elementary school that had a volunteer that was no longer volunteering for the organization, but was accused of being part of a sex trafficking ring. And this person had been involved with this elementary school as a parent volunteer, and they called me and they said, “If this becomes public, what do we do about it?” Thankfully, it never became public. And I also had a client who holds very, very large events, and they were in danger of losing their insurance coverage and could potentially have had to cancel the event, which are super beloved by the community. And so we laid out scenarios of what do we say if this happens? Thankfully, that didn’t happen either, but we were prepared if it did.

Farra Trompeter: So what I’m hearing is prepare for the worst case scenario, think about what you would, some of the basic things you would start off in saying, and come up with that game plan for communications channels and roles. Get that pre-vetted, so you don’t have to think about that, so you can be ready to really address the substance of it. So I appreciate that, and thank you for teaching me that many crises can in fact be predicted, just not necessarily the timing of them. Well, finally, as we were preparing for this conversation, you said something which really stuck with me, which was that a crisis isn’t always bad. If it generates an extraordinary amount of attention, your organization can leverage it. So I mean, given especially against the backdrop of our last conversation, can you elaborate on that and maybe share an example of a good crisis?

Joanna Brody: I would love to. I don’t believe that crises always indicate something bad or terrible happening to an organization. It, in fact, can be something good and positive, and exciting if it attracts an inordinate amount of attention. Think about if an employee wins the lottery or if you have a board member that wins a MacArthur genius grant. I’ve had two of my nonprofit clients where they had board members who won MacArthur Genius Grants. And so, you know, you can imagine there’s a lot of attention.

Joanna Brody: And then my favorite example is an arts education nonprofit that I worked for several years ago, in which the Duke and Duchess, also known as William and Kate, visited this client on their inaugural tour to Los Angeles. As you can imagine, that attracted massive, massive attention from literally all corners of the universe. When we first learned about it, we were sworn to secrecy about, you know, anything having to do with it. And then once it was announced, we had three weeks to prepare and orchestrate this thing literally down to the second. And it was very much like a crisis communications plan. We had designated spokespeople, we had our key messages, we had all of our channels ready to go with information as it came in. We also had to, you know, turn so many people away, you know, people were clamoring to volunteer at the organization, or how can they get in on it. And so we had to have a plan for that. So that was something that definitely called for a crisis communication type of plan and implementation.

Farra Trompeter: Great. Well, while folks are out there preparing their worst-case scenarios, they can also prepare for what happens when they win the lottery. So, I know I’ll be dreaming of that.

Joanna Brody: That might be an unexpected crisis. So I will stand corrected on that front.

Farra Trompeter: There you go.

Joanna Brody: Certainly the Duke and Duchess’s attendance was.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah. I’m not sure how many other folks out there will have the Duke and Duchess visit, but again, you never know. Well, if you’re out there and you’d like to learn more about Joanna’s agency, visit brody-pr.com. You can also connect with Joanna on LinkedIn. We will link to all of this in our show notes at bigduck.com/insights. Joanna, as we sign off, any other advice for our listeners?

Joanna Brody: Yes, I want everyone to understand that while crises can, of course, be extremely challenging and upsetting and bring out a lot of anxiety, they can be turned into opportunities. And I really hope that people can understand and embrace that, and would have the wherewithal to make that happen if a crisis does unfold for their organization.

Farra Trompeter: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. And everyone out there have a great rest of your day or evening.