 Welcome to the nonprofit show. We are so glad you're here. It's another episode, another day, and another fantastic guest. So I want to welcome to the show Laurie Hennessy, Executive Director, Pacific Northwest, One Love. And Laurie, we're excited to have you to talk to us about crisis communication in a nutshell. So stay with us as we dive deep into this very important and critical conversation that we're going to have with Laurie. But we want to remind you, I like to say if we have not met you yet, Julia Patrick, hello to you. Julia serves as the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And I'm Jarrett Ransom, your nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. We have been together for over four years. Thank you to our amazing, loyal, dedicated, presenting sponsors. They allow us these opportunities of conversation. So shout out to our friends at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd, as well as nonprofit tech talk. So these companies keep us going and growing because we have not come off the airwaves since early of March. So again, just really glad to be of service here. If you missed any of our episodes, we've produced nearly 900 now. You can download the app, go ahead and take your phone out. You can scan the QR code. You can also still find us on all of the streaming broadcast platforms. If you have a smart TV, you can just tell it to pull up the nonprofit show. The same with podcasts. We're on all of the main podcast platforms. We hope that you'll tune in, you know, in just a couple of hours after our live conversation that we're having with Lori right now. This episode will be up and on all of these platforms. So you can go back and listen, you can share them with your team, however you want to really just continue to learn and educate yourself. So make sure you tune in to us wherever you like to, I like to say wherever you like to, you know, absorb your entertainment and your education. So check us out on these platforms. And again, we are so thrilled, Lori, to have you with us. Again, for those watching and listening, we do have Lori Hennessey with us. She's the executive director, Pacific Northwest with One Love. Welcome to you, Lori. Hi, nice to be here. Yeah. Lori, tell us before we get going what One Love does. Because you as the executive director have to do a lot of things, but I would imagine you've done a lot and you continue to do a lot with communication. But let's back up and find out more about One Love. So One Love is a national foundation and we're all about healthy relationships. We were named for Yardley Love, La Crosse Player who was murdered by her ex-boyfriend and her family put together One Love more than a decade ago with the idea that everyone deserves to have a healthy relationship and if they had known some of the signs that were going on in their family member's life, that tragedy could have been averted. So we go into school, go talk to community groups and talk about what are the signs of a healthy relationship and what are the signs of an unhealthy relationship? And we do that as long as young of fifth grade now, just trying to reach as many young people as possible to tell them what those signs are. Love it, that's fabulous, really cool. Well, being that you are involved in the sector or segment of the nonprofit sector, it's even more meaningful to have this conversation because I would imagine you and your teams are confronted with a lot of bad news and tragic things. And so communicating in times of duress and everything, it's even more important. But let's start off our conversation with you kind of advise us to have a framework that crisis is not if, but when. Talk to us about that. Yeah, that's always been sort of my overarching theme for folks when they think about crisis is that some people think of it as a hypothetical, it only happens to other people, other organizations, not true, it will happen to everyone in the nonprofit sector at some point. So you can either plan for it and be ready for it and be smart about how you'll handle it or not. You're just bearing your head in the sand if you think you'll never deal with a crisis. So the most important thing is to actually have a plan. And that's kind of where I usually begin my conversation. That's really important. I have a question and it might seem odd, but like who defines if it's a crisis? Is it the internal organization? Is it the external stakeholders, right? Like who decides this is now a crisis and it requires communication? You know, I'm a huge believer in transparency. That sort of my, I think if you were to do one of those surveys, that would be the agenda that I connect to the most. And as a communicator, crisis to me is the time when most organizations go underground instinctively, either there's a problem with their finances or someone says something really bad or there's an accusation. Historically that was a time in our culture where people would pull inward. And what crisis communications is about and answer your question in terms of when it's a crisis to me, it's when the belief in you that is out there in the community goes down. The love for your organization, the belief in you, people wanting to follow you that all start to eroding really, really quickly because of something that happened. And once that crisis happened, you can't just ignore it and wish it away. In our green room chatter, you mentioned that there's really one primary goal of a crisis intervention or communication. What is that? You know, it's all about the apology. If there's one thing that I would tell people to keep in their mind as they navigate a crisis, it's that communications during a crisis really is about how you apologize. And when you apologize, and there's a whole school of thought, I actually teach about crisis comms at the university now and we have a whole segment on apologies and what makes an apology strong or weak, but the three key pieces you have to remember when you apologize, the first thing is it has to be fast. And in the social media world, it has to be faster than it used to be, right? Because things spiral quickly. And the second is you have to take accountability. You have to accept the blame. You can't deflect, blame the staff. It has to be accepted. But the third piece that most people miss when they apologize is what you're going to do. So a lot of times with elected officials who get caught in some scandal, they deflect and they never say how they're going to change the behavior. So to me, that's the biggest piece that most people miss when they do crisis communications is they have to react quickly, accept responsibility and then say, and here's what I'm going to do to either fix the situation or to pay the community back for this or to make things right. That's the piece that's really critical. Interesting. That's fascinating. And I wouldn't have necessarily put it in that context. But I think it's a, I love that you teed us up this way because I think it really reframes the conversation. And I want to ask you kind of moving forward. You talk about surviving crisis within your internal audience. Talk to us about what that means to you. I'm a big believer in the fact that the internal audience is the single most important audience during any crisis. Again, in the past, people forgot the internal audience. Oftentimes part of that pulling inward that leaders had was to start obfuscating, not sharing information. We now live in an age where if you don't have your internal audience, your employees, like in lockstep with you, supporting you, advocating for you, there can be tremendous damage, both short-term and long-term. So I always tell people within that crisis communications plan that you do, the first audience has to be internal. You can't start doing press releases if the local people don't know what's happening. You know, I love that because you're right, Lori. There's so much instant access to public information. And it typically starts internally with an employee or a recent employee sharing something online, and then it just snowballs into this, I don't know, ongoing negative spiral. So I love that you address this, particularly starting with that internal audience, because you're right. I love that you said they need to be in lockstep with you because then you have more people supporting and sharing the same message. Yeah, yeah. Your internal audience can either help you or they can hurt you. So that's like our staff and our board. And, you know, I'm assuming committees and support organizations, things of that. But now let's talk about what we would call the key stakeholders. I'm assuming you're talking about funders and donors, government, contractors, what does that ecosystem look like? In most crisis communications plans, there's a variety of things that come to play, right? You'll have a key messages, piece, oftentimes. You'll have like a call list of, and that's critical by the way, who to call in the middle of the night, who staffs your social media account. All of those pieces should be included in your plan. But one of the pieces I usually recommend is a matrix that outlines those key stakeholders. Something that shows here are the key groups that we have to go within a crisis and how to reach them, who's gonna be lead for reaching each one and when. And you can kind of prioritize in the 36, 48 hours after something happens, who gets notified when. So usually it's like internal audiences are very high, key donors very high, but oftentimes depending on your nonprofit, there's elected officials and elected officials are usually before anyone else. So the internal elected officials, key donors, and you work your way through all those audiences. A key audience that I always include is critics. Like who have been your critics in the past who have had a concern with your nonprofit? And for those audiences, I usually suggest developing something called rude cues, a series of rude questions that you would have ready to go. So if the leader has his talk or is in the community, he's ready for those people who have always been most vocally critical of the organization. So you can kind of target those audiences. Love that. I've never heard of that, but I love it. I think that's just genius. Cause I can see that it builds confidence. It kind of erodes the power of that other naysayer or other competing, you know, force. That's really smart. Wow, I'm taking that to the bank. That's super cool. Really. Do you recommend that everyone receives a phone call? Are there certain levels of relationships or connections that maybe a certain group of those stakeholders, you know, deserve a phone, and maybe not deserve as the right word, but, you know, should have a phone call. Others get an email. Others part of like social media. How do you decide that level of connection? That's the beauty of doing your planning now, right? Before whatever happens. Okay. You have all those key people from your organization in a room saying, okay, who's getting a call in the first 24 hours after something happened? Who's going to have responsibility for that person? And what are they going to say? And then maybe it's, okay, the next three days, who's going to get email? And who's going to have responsibility for that? And you can kind of plan for those tiers of who you're going to go to and what order. Not everyone gets a call. Sometimes for like the general public, it just might be a social media posting, right? They just might see something on your Facebook page, but you have to outline it so that that person in the community doesn't see something on Facebook before the mayor gets a phone call. So that's all part of planning that, I always say three to five day period is really critical. Okay, so let's jump into that because that's what I'm so intrigued. I love your idea of an action spreadsheet. I can kind of see it in my mind, but let's talk about the timing of this. I loved Jared's first question. How do we know we're in crisis? How do we define it? But you're talking about hours, minutes, hours and days, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're in an age now where it's not like it was when I started my career, right? And you would have the luxury and putting in our press release and I don't know, faxing it. The news cycle, yeah? We had a news cycle, can you imagine? Yeah. But now, because everything can happen so quickly, that's why I think it's so critically important that we plan because those who are our detractors will be on social media very quickly. And there are a lot of examples of this. The one I use usually is the United Airlines incident where a passenger was dragged off of a plane. That went very badly for the United because social media made that happen, right? There was just a woman there filming it. And the next thing you know, it went crazy. So United waited, I think it was three days before they responded, and it just did not go over well at all because of the pacing of social media. Yeah, you're right. There's a lot of things that are posted as they are happening now with live media streams because going back to the news cycle, it used to only be reporters had access to live outlets. We all have access now to live outlets. We've equalized that level of power where now anyone has as much power. The person who filmed the person in United, if you remember another incident of someone getting on a plane while he was saying something sort of racist about AIDS. By the time her plane landed, she'd been fired from her job because of social media. So all of a sudden we've spread power out where more people now can actually be carrying messages and communicating, which is fantastic. But we need to plan for it. So when you're talking about planning, I've got a couple of real drill down questions. One of them is to kind of bump to what Jared said. Do you create scenarios of crisis? And then say if crisis A happens, here's the plan of crisis B. I mean, do you get that specific? Yeah, a good crisis communications plan. You can have something that is so deep where it'll say, here's five scenarios. One, like I worked at the zoo in Seattle. So you can have a spreadsheet and it's really, data geeks would really enjoy this. It has the two access bars. And one shows the impact of the crisis on your organization from low to high. And the other shows the chances that this would happen from low to high, right? So those crises that are the worst are those that have a high chance of happening and high impact on your organization. So if you plot those on a graph, those are the worst. So like at a zoo, that would be an animal, an animal attacking someone would have horrible impact on the organization, but it's not very likely to happen. So you don't put as much time in the planning for that in your plan, you put more time in the things that are more likely to happen. But you can put that all in the plan. Interesting, that is interesting. Talk to us about your breakdown, just given that we just talked about social media. Do you time this out? Do you say that these are like step one through 10 based on hours in a day? Or what does that look like when it comes to planning? What I usually would do is have a spreadsheet where it's actually, it's issue areas, right? So like one thing would be social media, what you're gonna do there. Media relations, who the key targets are, who's gonna be cleared to talk to people. One of the things that seems really simple that people forget is that a crisis communications plan needs to have contact information. Like if something happens to your nonprofit at night, you want to be able to reach your communications person, your person who does social media and you want it all in one place. So that's the kind of stuff that I usually put in there is some of the duties and jobs you'll be doing and who you should be reaching and what the audiences are you'll be reaching in each. Interesting. Do you use with media outlets? So that if they actually hear of a crisis before the community does, hopefully they come to you first. Have you seen that happen to where like they kind of stave off the news because they have a relationship with you? The media outlets, you mean? Yes. Yeah, I mean, you can, I mean, I obviously, you're not sharing the plan with them but you're reaching out to like, let's say I'm in Seattle, let's say you reach out to the person who's in charge of following the nonprofit area from the local paper or local public radio, make sure you have that relationship. You don't ideally want your first call to any outlet being a crisis, right? So you want to make sure you have a good media relationship person who has that relationship. And as you all know, I'm sure in our sector, that's kind of a dying thing. Back when I entered the nonprofit sector, the thing I was proudest about was my media relations time, right? And my relationships. That's an area that nonprofits don't focus on as much as they used to. We focus more and more on social media. So I always encourage nonprofits to make sure you have at least one person on staff who really spends time developing relationships because the media still is very important. It hasn't gone away. Exactly. And I think that there are a lot of stories that get blown up. And it's a small thing that then escalates. And I think if you have strong relationships, there's an opportunity, maybe for a story not to be killed, like Jared's implying, but maybe at least that reporter or producer picks up the phone and calls and says, hey, this might be a story it might not be. Tell us why it is or why it isn't. And I think sometimes you can head off something or at least get your point of view as an organization and not end up being reactionary. Definitely. Definitely. And one, I'm sorry, did I interrupt you there? Yeah, one thing I always say is that for me, I oftentimes when I talk about crisis, people always say, well, give me an example. Who does crisis communications well? My example would be Dr. Anthony Fauci. And the reason was for me, when we all went through this massive crisis together, the reason he's seen as a crisis communicator expert is because he always didn't know. He was never ashamed when he didn't have the information, total transparency and just a sense of, here's what I know, I'm opening up the books, I'm sharing everything with you. And then the key piece, empathy, always saying in his communications, I feel for you, family, they're suffering right now. So there's a lot of scholarly work now being done, looking at Dr. Fauci and what he's taught us about communication. So if anyone out there is looking for, oh, this is so big, how do I start? Go watch some of those best conferences. Well, that's interesting. Talk about a silver lining of the last how many years now? Yeah, I love that you said that because I think that's true. I think that it's especially in the nonprofit sector where we're always educating ourselves, we're learning about new things, we have new crises that come up, we don't have the answers. And yet our community looks to us, I think almost like we're at fault if we don't have the answer. Does that make sense? I mean, Jared, do you see that? Oh yeah, I do. And especially on social media, people are really quick to tag an organization. And I've been a part of this as an interim CEO, Laurie, where the organization was tagged saying that they had talked to all of the executives and they hadn't, right? But you also don't wanna come back to that person in a negative light because I also believe how we respond to people is part of our messaging. That's, it's funny, you just touched on, I usually have like the top 10 things that I've gone through and one of them always is to not be defensive. Whenever you're defensive, it only hurts you. I always tell people, if you're angry, go and kick the wall. And then do an interview because defensiveness never helps anyone. Even though sometimes there's great injustice, right? Either an unfair article or something that shouldn't have happened. But there's lots of research around how people physically respond to anger and defensiveness. And the minute they see that through someone, they will stop listening to you. So I always tell people, put your person in front of the camera who radiates empathy, kindness, transparency. And if you're the CEO who doesn't know how to get tough questions without being defensive, don't put them in front of the camera or don't put her in front of the camera. Put someone else in front of the camera because there's a talent to be likeable and defensiveness never works. It's the same thing with no comment. Don't ever say no comment. I know. That's like one of my number one rules, don't ever say no comment. Say, I don't know. I always tell people there's a thousand ways to say no comment. You can just say, oh boy, we're still doing all the research and data and we'll get back to you soon. I just said no comment. But yeah, the minute people hear that, they think you're guilty. I agree. And I think it's lazy. And I think it tags into what you just said. It's defensive. Whether you mean to be or not, I just think it is a communication that leads to nothing good. So yeah, really, really interesting, this conversation. And I think, Laurie, what you said in the very beginning by framing this up, it's not if, it's when. You can be doing the work of the angels, but bad things happen to good people and you gotta be prepared. One of my last questions for you today is, how often should we be doing a communications plan? You know, I think my theory is we should have a crisis communications plan and it can to a degree be kind of an evergreen document that sits there. You just wanna update it one for a while. So if you have a crisis comms plan and the first page is emergency contact info, that should be people who currently work with you, right? You don't have to redo the whole thing, but you should take it out occasionally and just brush it up. I also think in case we didn't mention it, in addition to a crisis comms plan, please, please do media training. People who have not gone through media training, it's really critical if you're a leader and a nonprofit. And again, media still matters because it becomes social content. So I always say have a crisis comms plan, update it occasionally, like let's say yearly, just look at it to make sure it's accurate. Get some media training for your top executives. If you do those things alone, you will be way ahead of the game. Yeah. And then what about these scenarios you mentioned? Is that something the board should be involved in? Like as we have our strategic planning sessions or we have certain meetings, right? Are we asking our board members to contribute to this? I don't think the board has to contribute, especially, I mean, depending on your communications department size, they can really own this, but I think the board should hear how it ends up. Like I've had places where the comms team will go into the board and say, and some people don't have a team, right? There might be the media and a small nonprofit coming and saying, we've put together a crisis comms plan. Here's what it is in general, walk them through it and say, are you all good with it? I don't think the board has to be involved in responding to crisis, unless of course it involves something happening to the executive director. And I think the board chair has a different role on this situation. Okay, I love it. Great, thank you. Well, you have been tremendous. I've really enjoyed hearing your thoughtful approach and why this is necessary and how we can achieve it, even with a small team. I feel like the things that you've outlined for us are logical and they're achievable and something we really need to have in place. Lori Hennessey, executive director, Pacific Northwest One Love. Join OneLove.org is their website. You need to check it out. They have a vast network of folks around the country doing amazing things and it really is an important topic in society today. JoinOneLove.org, like I said, check them out. Lori, this is great. You've been speaking my love language. These are the things that I love. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, been joined today by Jared R. Ransom, non-profit nerd, my non-profit nerd, but she can be yours too. Great job. We like to say that. Hey, again, we are here because of our amazing sponsors and they include Blumerang American Non-profit Academy, your part-time controller, non-profit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staff and boutique, non-profit nerd, and non-profit tech talk. These are the people that join us day in and day out so that we can get daily episodes to you. Jared reminded me briefly, we're marching on 900 episodes, which I'm like, what the hell? That's incredible. There's a lot of information out there. Yeah, there's a lot. I know, I love it. I think we're like 840, but really working towards that 900, we'll hit 1,000 probably over this year, so really exciting. And thank you to Lori and all of our other amazing guests that allow us this opportunity because we certainly, Julia, I know there's days where it seems like a really heavy lift and I am so extremely glad to have the support of our sponsors and our guests and our viewers, right? Our viewers, our viewers make it all worthwhile and we have a great team that works on this. You get to see Jared and I, but there are folks behind us that really support us and lift us up and so it's really a remarkable thing. I guess that we're witnessing our communications, Lori, right before you. Nice job. But anyway, hey everybody. We like to end every episode with this message and especially for our nonprofit sector. And the message is very simple. Just stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.