 My name is Jessica Unger and I'm the Emergency Programs Coordinator here at the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation. We're so pleased to be able to offer today's program as a part of a webinar series that addresses the needs of the Alliance for Response Community and other cooperative disaster networks nationwide. These programs are made possible through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. I'm so glad to see so many familiar faces, people who are able to join us for past programs in this webinar series. And I hope that you will likewise be able to join us for our final webinar which will take place this Thursday at 1pm on the Best Practices for Seeking Funding. We're really fortunate to be joined through that program by the manager of disaster fundraising at the American Red Cross. Before we dive into today's presentations, I just wanted to share a couple of brief technical notes. On your screen you'll see several boxes including one labeled chat on the left side, one labeled web links, and one labeled files on the bottom. Use the chat box to say hello, ask questions, and share information. If you post a question you'll receive a response either from me or from my colleague Emily Comforto. Any questions will be noted, collected, and I will ask them of the presenter. To use the web links box, click on the link that you want to see and highlight it in blue. Then click on the browse to button to go to that site. In the files box, likewise, click on the file you want to download, highlight it blue, and then click the download file button. An additional note for today's program, our presenter will be making use of the raised hand function. The top of your screen you'll notice an icon with a raised hand, so when the time comes, please be sure to use that feature if it applies to you. If you're unable to attend Thursday's session or missed a past program in this series, don't worry. We've been recording all programs and hosting the sessions on AIC's YouTube channel, which is available at youtube.com backslash user, backslash ai conservation. An easier way to do that is to just click on the web links box under the AIC YouTube channel. We've been aiming to get all of the sessions up within a week of the webinar date and often they're just up within a couple of days, so do keep an eye on that for today's recording as well. For those who aren't familiar with Alliance for Response Initiative, I just wanted to give a bit of context about the history and goals of the program. Alliance for Response began almost 15 years ago with a key mission in mind to help communities more effectively protect their cultural and historic resources. The immediate objectives are to build relationships, initiating an ongoing dialogue between cultural institutions and emergency managers and first responders. To educate cultural heritage and emergency management professionals, working to raise awareness of the need to protect cultural and historic resources within communities, encourage disaster planning and mitigation at archives, historic sites, libraries, and museums, and of course to develop strong, ongoing networks to facilitate effective local response. Today's topic of crisis communications is central to almost all of these goals, so we're really fortunate to be joined today by a speaker. I discuss who can address this topic with years of expertise. Many of you might be familiar with Alliance for Response as an initiative of heritage preservation. In May of 2015, Heritage Preservation closed its doors, but fortunately many of its programs transferred to the foundation of the American Institute for Conservation at that time. Alliance for Response and other emergency initiatives at Heritage Preservation joined forces with the emergency initiatives currently underway at FAIC, including the National Heritage Responders, formerly known as AIC CERT, a team of trained collections care professionals who can provide on-the-ground support for impacted cultural heritage institutions. You can find out more information about the National Alliance for Response Initiative and the existing networks by visiting our website at heritageemergency.org. You can access the link by clicking on the web links box below. Before I turn things over, we just wanted to get a quick sense of who is on the webinar today. So to that end, we have a few quick poll questions. Those of you who have been on sessions before will be very familiar with these. First up, you are currently involved with the Alliance for Response Network. You've seen a really nice range of responses to this question over the last four sessions, and I'm seeing similar responses this time. So we're getting about a bit, a split of 55% currently, yes, involved with an AFR network and 45%. No, so that's great. Okay, next up, if you are involved with Alliance for Response, do you know anyone who is... Oops, sorry, I'm going to reopen this. Apologies, I just need to clear out. Okay, sorry about that. No, please go ahead and share your responses. So if you're involved with the AFR, do you know anyone from the network outside of your region? It is really wonderful to see how many of you are already in communication with others, and some networks even have agreements in place. Certainly, kind of activity you want to encourage. So, okay, we're seeing, yes, about 60% of you are in communication, and about 40% of you currently are not. So an opportunity in the future. And then our final poll question here, one moment. If you're joining us today from the U.S., what region are you joining us from? Note that this is different from some of the past questions that we've asked. So we have changed some of the regions here and have included the states next to them. So please use that as a guide to say where you're joining us from today. Great, so wonderful representation from the Mid-Atlantic. Some folks from the Southeast and from the West as well. Great. All right, thank you so much. Those are always really helpful for us to get a better sense of who's on the program today and for the benefit of our presenters as well. So today we're incredibly fortunate to be joined by our fantastic presenter, Mike Smith, and our wonderful discussant, Steve Pine. Michael Smith, Ph.D., is Chair of the Communication Department at LaSalle University in Philadelphia. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in public relations, organizational communication, and conflict. As a trainer and consultant for LaSalle's nonprofit center, he has worked with a variety of nonprofits, including the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, CCAHA. I think I saw some folks from CCAHA on the program today. For several years he presented CCAHA-sponsored disaster mitigation and recovery workshops to cultural institutions around the country and has recently served as a part of the crisis planning team at LaSalle. Steve Pine is Senior Decorative Arts Conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. He is a member of the National Heritage Responders, co-chair of the Texas Cultural Emergency Response Network, Texas CERA and AFR Network, and serves on the Advisory Committee for Alliance for Response and the New York City Alliance for Response Group. Steve is also a past chair of the AIC Emergency Committee. He has been deployed to assist public and private collections following Hurricane Katrina, Rita, AIC, and Superstorm Sandy. And with that, I'm pleased to turn things over to Mike Smith. Mike, take it away. Hi everyone, how are we today? My volume is coming through. My system is sort of locked out here for a minute. I think we're back on track though. I want to welcome... Okay, great. Thanks, Jess. I want to welcome everyone to this afternoon's seminar. And for those of you in LA, I will pass you a cup of coffee if I could. But I'm really happy to see everyone here. I really appreciate it over the years, the work that I've done with various cultural institutions and the work that you do for communities, and anything that we can do to help preserve and protect the heritage that you conserve is an important thing. I want to go over the agenda that we'll be following for the next hour or so before we turn it over to Steve. We've already had a little bit of an introduction to the goals of this whole series as well as today's webinar. We're going to talk a little bit for a few minutes about crisis definition and the characteristics of a crisis or a disaster. The reason we do this is because it really does guide a lot of the planning that we do as we go forward. Then we'll talk a little bit about anticipating crises and some of the work that you do before a crisis or a disaster strikes. Then we'll talk about creating the crisis communication plan and some of the nuts and bolts and tools for doing that. Then finally implementing the plan and post-crisis recovery. What do you do after the media leaves and you still have to communicate with all the people who are important to the organization? As we begin here, I'm going to draw on a little Disney inspiration. I think I spent a little too much time with my granddaughter over the holidays here. I want to congratulate you on the work that, first of all, facing up to the fact that disasters might strike your organization. I know that many of you have been involved in emergency preservation for a number of years, but it's still encouraging to see the number who show up for a seminar like this. To work with the Los Alas Nonprofit Center, I would do two kinds of seminars. One on media relations and telling your story and promoting the organization and then the crisis communication one. The media relations one was always standing room only. The crisis communication one had two or three people in it. We got this really difficult to face this, to confront the reality of what could possibly happen to your organization. You either have the inclination to do something like this, duck and cover and hide from things, your emergency training, then I guess you're preparing for a disaster that I'm not aware of, or to get panicked and scream a little bit about. But all of you here today are being brave in facing up to the challenges that might happen during a crisis. And so I congratulate you on that and encourage you to keep spreading the word about being prepared and how that can help your organizations recover in case something does in fact happen. I'll spend, as I mentioned before, a few minutes defining a crisis, because again the characteristics of a crisis help guide us in developing a plan. I don't necessarily have to answer this in the chat area, but when you think of crises and disasters, what comes to mind? For some people, traffic on the way to work becomes a crisis for them. An overheated burrito on a microwave can cause a crisis for some people. But for those of us who are planning disaster recovery for organizations, I think crises take on a whole new meaning. I ask you to think of this question so that you can get in the mindset of imagining what might happen to your organizations as we walk through some of the communication steps that you might take as we create a plan. Definitions of what actually constitutes a crisis, but for me and for the purposes of this webinar, I would define a crisis as something that is immediate, significant, static, threatening, and stressed, characterizes that has those characteristics. So what do I mean by these things? A crisis is immediate. They're unfolding in real time. Decisions can't be delayed. The need for information is immediate, both from the media, from first responders, from your stakeholders, from your volunteers, from your staff. They need information about how to respond to the crisis, and they can't wait for you to look it up, to consult somebody, to research. The information needs to be coming pretty quickly. Crises are also significant. They can severely disrupt your operations. They can unfortunately damage or destroy your collections or structure. And they can displace employees and volunteer staff a few years ago, and I'll refer to this story again in a moment. We moved my son to college down in Florida in the middle of a tropical storm. And not only were we a little inconvenienced because the storm shut down campus for four days, but most of the employees at the institution were displaced from their own homes. And so to be able to respond to our needs took a lot longer because of that. So particularly with the kinds of disasters that I know the network for response has faced before, I think that you understand the notion of significance here. They're dramatic. Disasters are spectacular. Things falling over, things flooding, inflames, and giving you indigestion after eating lunch here when we begin to think about all these. The thing about being dramatic is that that is what feeds media coverage of disasters. They look for the most dramatic footage of something happening to an organization, and you hope that it isn't yours. But it also, again, prepares you for the fact that the media and other people are going to be paying attention to the responses that you make. They're threatening. Poor recovery can threaten the existence of your organization if you lose a collection because of flood or fire damage or earthquakes. It might not be a reason for your organization. Finally, they're stressful. Think about stress in a couple of different ways. First, they're emotionally and physically stressful. You know, if physically stressful, you're up for many hours. There's lots of decisions to be made. Those decisions are high pressure. Stress people make poor decisions, which is why a good crisis preparation plan is very important. If you have clear guidelines on how to respond to things, you don't have to worry about making many decisions in the moment. I mean, there are a lot of things that you will have to respond to, but knowing what to say to the media initially shouldn't be one of those things if you've prepared ahead of time. I'll also say that they're stressful on communication systems. Later on, when we talk about the ways that you want to build capacity for communication, we'll talk about this again. But in some studies of disasters, I'm particularly familiar with campus events like campus crime or school shootings or those sorts of things. Website traffic trying to get information has crashed servers. The website traffic at least triples, if not more. And then any other sorts of communication channels that you use, social media, phone banks, those sorts of things are also stressed to the max. So how do you prepare for that sort of stress on a communication system? Those are some of the things that we'll talk about here in a few moments. Again, as I mentioned a moment ago, the reason for thinking about these is because they help guide the principles for what goes into a plan. One case I'm going to refer to throughout the presentation is a flood that occurred at the Kentucky Derby Museum in Louisville. Both my daughter and wife are big horse fans, and so they were quite distraught when the museum was flooded. When you have a moment, there is some footage linked to the web links down toward the bottom of your screen that has some footage of the Kentucky Derby Museum flood taken from inside the museum as the flood was happening. This is a screenshot from that footage. Those two vehicles in the center of the picture were actually their outreach vehicles that they used to do educational programs. And that's what the parking lot looked like. By the end of the flood there was at least a foot of water in many of the lower level spaces where many of the collections were kept. Several of the displays were in danger of experiencing some water damage, but the quick response from the staff and the training that they had been through before the disaster happened helped them recover a good portion of the material that was in danger. It gives you a sense of what, if you have not yet been in a disaster or a crisis yourself, it gives you a sense of what the experiences like to be in the middle of it. One of the things that strikes me in watching the Derby Museum flood footage is how relatively calm the staff and the volunteers are, which suggests to me that they had some training before this happened. Here is where the raise your hand function comes in. If you could raise your hand and give us a sense if you've ever been in the middle of or had to respond to a crisis that involved your institution. So Jess had pointed out the raise your hand button at the top of the page if you would like to go ahead and hit that if you've ever been involved in one. I don't see many hands going up. Which is probably a good thing. God forbid I wish this on anybody. So you can have some good stories. This is Jess jumping in. I'm not sure if you can see this feature as a presenter as opposed to a host but I see that 15 people in the group have raised their hand. Okay, thanks Jess. And you're right, I can't see the hands going up. So about 15 people have been involved with some. So my condolences. But I hope that your experience has proven helpful in terms of preparing for future responses and that the outcome was good for your organization. I also hope though that some of these characteristics that we discussed were in fact things that you experienced there. So with that in mind let's talk a little bit more specifically about planning for a crisis. There's essentially three stages that you need to plan for in a crisis. The pre-crisis phase which is where you anticipate and prepare for the crisis or disaster that might happen. The actual crisis itself where you work on responding to the crisis and both with the actual recovery operations that you'll be engaged in as well as communication. And then finally the post-crisis stage where there's some recovery and continuity that goes on. Each one of these stages involves communication. Each one of these stages helps prepare you for the next stage in terms of preparing and being ready to communicate during a crisis. So let's talk a little bit about the pre-crisis stage. As I mentioned a moment ago, the pre-crisis stage involves detecting, averting if possible, and preparing for potential crises or disasters. This stage involves a couple of different things. But before we talk about that I think it's important to understand that there are a couple of different kinds of crises that might happen to an organization. These categories come from the Institute for Crisis Management which has been studying media coverage of crises for over 15 years now. Over time they've identified two types of crises that seem to emerge. The first type is what they label sudden crisis. They're relatively unexpected events. They arrive with little warning and the response time to those crises is accelerated. Many of you, a good portion of you seem to be from the mid-Atlantic region and probably experienced the good kite flying weather that we had yesterday which went up to 60 miles an hour. There were some power outages, there were trees down and all of that. That was a relatively sudden crisis. There was some prediction of it in the weather going back over the weekend but it came on pretty suddenly and affected a number of organizations around here. Some categories of sudden crises would be things like natural disasters, weather emergencies, accidents that happen in or around your property, and crime. The one thing I'll say about these though is that many of these crises can be anticipated and planned for. If you live along the east coast of the United States, chances are you will experience a hurricane, for instance. To not be prepared for a hurricane, especially after Superstorm Sandy and many of the other tropical storms that we've had would not be a smart thing. A lot of crises then are what the Institute for Crisis Management called smoldering crises. These are crises that are slow to develop but they often provide some clues that they're developing. They could be prevented if detected and there is a longer time to respond if you're vigilant, if you are keeping an eye on what's going on around your organization. I will say all things that are not necessarily under the purview of the disaster coordination efforts that many of your organizations have been in where we're talking about large-scale disasters. These are more internal crises that happen within an organization. And I give some examples of theft and the degradation of the collection through mold or water leaks, sun exposure, problems with volunteers where, again, they might be doing something illicit or illegal. With regard to the degradation of materials, I remember one of the seminars I did with the Cultural Center for Art and Historic Artifacts, where in the morning we would have a disaster expert come in and they would basically scare the Bejesus out of most of the participants over what would happen. And he was talking about a museum that had a fine furniture collection. And every night the custodians would come in and clean up sawdust from under the furniture until one day one of the pieces collapsed and they realized that they had a major termite infestation. This had been going on for months and no one bothered to tell anybody that, hey, we're getting a lot of sawdust around all this high-quality wooden furniture. So maybe we should do something about that. According to the Institute for Crisis Management, over 60% of the crises that have occurred to many organizations over the last 15 years or so have been smoldering crises so that they have some indication that they might happen. I think you can combine the two when you think of some disasters because we know that some organizations are better prepared to withstand, say, a hurricane than others are. And even though they know that they could be the victim of a hurricane or flood or blizzard or tornado or an earthquake, depending on what part of the country you're in, they still haven't prepared for what might happen. So this, again, influences the sort of research and vigilance that you might want to engage in before a crisis actually hits. Three main steps, once you understand the difference between a sudden and a smoldering crisis, three main steps in planning are to research, prioritize, and if possible, prevent the crisis from occurring. There are a few things that, again, there's a lot of different ways that you can go about researching for a crisis, but a couple of suggestions that I'll make relates to the experiences that many of you have had. You've looked around the cultural sector, cultural preservation organizations, and you can see what has happened to other places. You sort of say a little prayer every night that it doesn't happen to your organization, but you know that there have been fires and different things that have happened to other organizations. I think the really good work that you do as an alliance is to prepare for those things kind of as a sector so you can share best practices with people about how to prepare and respond to these things. So there's a lot of research ongoing in your sector about what some of those things might be. I would also encourage organizations to review their own operations and policies For instance, do you have a fire emergency plan? I'm going to guess many of you do, but there are some institutions that don't. Not only in many municipalities is this a requirement, it's a legal requirement, but it's also just good sound management practice. So do you have one? Because if a fire broke out in your organization and something happened to say a volunteer or your collection, that would be one of the questions somebody from the outside, like a reporter might ask. The third thing is to think like an investigator or a reporter. Somebody would come in and take a hard look at your organization, its structure, its operations, its policies and so on. What would they find? If what they found was something that was reported to the public, would you be embarrassed by that? Then finally, and I apologize for using the term, it used to be that when I first learned about this principle of doing research, to think like a sociopath. But more recently, I think it's more apt to say think like a terrorist. If somebody intentionally wanted to do harm to your organization, what would they do? What could they do? The first place I would look is my computer systems for instance, because the number one threat for a lot of organizations is a cyber attack. But again, if there are other things that might be vulnerable to the work of somebody who intentionally wanted to do your harm, it would be good to look at them and to harden them before something actually happened. Now it's one thing to research the crisis, and I hope that I'm not making you increasingly paranoid as this webinar goes on. It's another thing to sort of prioritize what you might plan for. You cannot, I think most of us do not have the resources to plan for every single contingency. And also thinking about all those can actually drive you a little batty after a while. I'm the sort of guy because I've done enough of these things and have been studying crisis. I'll walk into an organization, like even a grocery store. And if you wish to remain in conference, please press any key now. I'm the kind of guy who walks into a bank or an airport or grocery store and I begin to look for the security cameras and where the exits are and everything. So thinking about this stuff over time can make you a little bit paranoid. However, one thing that helps you clear the clutter a little bit is to think about what the probability might be. This is one version of a prioritization matrix. I think there are some other ones out there. It basically asks you to look at two things. The probability of something happening and the impact on the organization. Some things are highly likely to happen and would have a high impact. Those are the things you want to prepare for first if you haven't already. Those things that are highly likely to happen but would have less of an impact would be the next things and so on around the grid. The least likely to happen with the least impact you don't worry about until you have a little bit more time and resources to pay attention to them. So for instance, to give you an example of where some things might lie here, the graphic that I've just put up is a sample of a federal map on floodplains with various zones that are... the way that various zones are divided based on how likely it is that a significant flood might happen or storm surge. If you're in the site closest to the coast, you better be planning for floods and water damage. Again, that makes sense but it's surprising how many organizations plan for things that probably won't happen to them as opposed to the things that will. On the other hand, if you're planning for a zombie apocalypse, I think that's highly unlikely to happen. Now, I know some people might disagree with me. My children, for instance, think that one is coming and if you watch The Walking Dead, you might think that one is coming but probably not so very unlikely, very low impact probably and so that's something you don't... Now, that's a silly example but again, it's amazing how many organizations I've worked with where they spend a lot of time on things that probably won't happen to them. The final thing I'll talk about in terms of preparation before we get into the actual communication plan is to try to do some things beforehand to mitigate what might happen. A couple of things here in terms of prevention and preparation. If there's a way to fix the problem ahead of time, if for instance you have a wall that is structurally unsound and you can do some things to fix that, that would be good. If you need to upgrade your fire equipment and haven't done that, that would be good to do. And then create emergency response plans for the various highly likely, highly impactful contingencies that might be out there. This becomes very important when we talk about crisis communication because a lot of what happens with crisis communication is telling people what your emergency response plan is, what's happening, what's going to happen. We'll talk about that here in a moment. The other things that you can do, this is more a communication, sort of a soft skills approach here, but I am happy to hear when Jess was going over the goals of these workshops that one of the important things is relationship building. So with that in mind, you might want to consider reporting something negative about the organization if it's something that can be fixed with resources. So for instance I've seen a couple of organizations that discovered problems with the way that they were protecting their collections that were things that could be fixed with a little bit more money and so they used it as sort of the basis for fundraising, a donor involvement project, with your executive directors and boards. Hey, we're going to talk about something that's wrong with the organization so I understand that, but it can be useful. You want to develop good relationships with all the people that you depend on, your volunteers, your staff, any vendors that you work with, your community, et cetera. If you're in the middle of a fight with somebody in your community and it's kind of a public battle over things like maybe parking or crowd control or zoning or whatever and something happens to the organization, you'll have a little less credibility and a little less sympathy from people than you would in high debut. You want to develop good media relations so you want to be able to be seen as a dependable resource for good information on a variety of things, accurate information, truthful information and helping reporters do their jobs. If you have that reputation, then if you tell a reporter in the middle of a crisis, I don't have anything to tell you about that right now. They're more likely to believe that as opposed to believing that you're hiding something from them. And then finally, you want to develop, you want to prepare to communicate. You want to make sure that all the tools that you might want to use in the event of an emergency are ready to go and we'll talk about what those tools are here in the next section, all right? Okay, now that you've thought about all the awful things that can happen to you, let's talk about putting a plan in place here. You know you're having a bad day when you have a group of reporters tagging along behind you, asking you challenging questions about what's going on in your organization that at least I know from experience that a lot of people don't think about communicating in a crisis until an emergency actually breaks out. And then you'll see by the smiling PR person in the emergency case there, that they want to put a happy face on things that are happening. Neither one of those is a really great response. You need to think about communication beforehand and it's not always about putting lipstick on a pig and saying, oh, things are hunky-dory here. Good honest communication about what's happening in your organization as a disaster is happening is the key to good crisis communication. In putting a plan together, there are two components that you need to think about. I've already referred to one of those components in talking about the preparation that you put in place and that's the operational response. What precisely is going to be done to solve the problem? So if you've had a flood, first of all, what are you doing to protect the collection? What's being done to move the collection? What happens when you go to recover and preserve the collection? I, for instance, didn't know you could freeze-dry a book until I started working with the Cultural Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. That would be something that people are going to want to know in the middle of a crisis. And then what others do to solve the problem. The things that you're doing, but also if there are other first responders, federal emergency management people, other members of the Alliance who come to your assistance, what are they going to do to help come to the solution of the problem at hand? The second thing then, and the thing that kind of brings us here today, is the communication response. And at least in my opinion, the main bulk of the communication response is what you say about the first thing. What do you tell people about the operational response? That to me is what goes into the plan, particularly for some of the communication messages. Again, remember that crises are stressful, and if you can plan many of these things in advance, you can reduce the stress and the poor decision-making that might happen in the middle of a crisis. PR Communication 101, before we get into some of the nuts and bolts and the principles of putting a plan together. A communication strategy is what you say or do, the messages that you want, a public, and by public I mean the media, your neighbors, volunteers, staff, employees, etc. What do you want them to see and hear? These include the actions you're taking, actions speak louder than words. Key facts you want people to know. The story you want people to remember about your organization, what we stood for for all these years, what we hope to stand for in the future, that we do plan to recover and resume our operations, and so on. And then reassurance that yes, we're doing what we can to solve this problem and to recover, and yes, if we're able to, we will reopen stronger than ever. Communication tactics that are all the tools that you use in the news media, which can be reached through social media, so reporters are on Twitter, for instance, in Facebook. The news media is everybody who might cover your organizations from any news organization, radio, TV, print, etc. The organizational media is what you already have, so your website, your newsletter, your Twitter feed, anything that you own yourself that can be used to communicate during a crisis. Any interpersonal media or social media, so any interaction that you have with your volunteers, with staff, etc., one-on-one, that might help them communicate in the middle of the crisis. And finally, any advertising and promotional media, this usually comes a little bit after the crisis, where you might want ads to say, hey, we're going to reopen on these dates, etc. But it is still part of the media mix that you have at your disposal. We should tweet. And I will say again that I really think strategy is almost as important as the tools that you use to communicate messages. So with that in mind, here are some principles that involve both strategy, what you say and do, and tactics in putting a crisis plan together. I believe that good crisis communication is coordinated, quick, accurate, flowing, and human. I wish I could come up with a catchy acronym for that. Maybe I'll use different terms one of these years, but these are the principles that have stood the test of time and have exemplified really good crisis communication responses. So let's talk a little about these. Coordination is the first one, and there's sort of two parts to this. The first is getting the team together to create the plan. Again, this is a step that you might be taking, and it should be taking before a crisis even happens. So in formulating a crisis response plan, you might want to get people together. These people include decision makers. Who's going to be in charge of saying we actually have a disaster on our hands and we need to implement the plan? Who needs to make decisions about where things are going to be moved, how it's going to be paid for, et cetera? Some examples of these people would be the executive director or representative, any managers, depending on how large your organization is, there might be managers or who supervise various collections. They might need to be involved in this. And then lawyers. I might add accountants as well who can talk about some of the nuts and bolts of the ramifications for some of the decisions that you make. The second group of people are doers. These are the people who actually would be in place to fix the problem. So the actual responders, including firefighters, maybe police officers, et cetera. As well as anybody else, you might bring in recovery workers, engineers who might help structurally support what might have collapsed in the organization, et cetera. I also separate out volunteers here because you might have random volunteers who come in just to help, but you might have a regular group of volunteers who are necessarily part of the management team normally, but might need to be brought in to have a sense of what... Then the second group would be those who communicate about it. For those of you who are large enough institutions where you have a marketing director, maybe a media relations person, people who handle your social media, et cetera, they need to be brought in here in terms of talking about the messaging and tactics that might be employed. That I talk about coordination would be planning to keep people together during a crisis. I believe that Steve is going to talk a little bit about this later on when he discusses the disasters that he's responded to. But is there a way, for instance, that key people in these areas of responsibility can stay connected during a crisis? Are there tools in that? We know that in many major disasters, the wireless networks, for instance, are affected. So what tools do you have for people to stay in touch with each other? The way that the team might get together once a crisis, once a disaster is unfolding. Are there going to be regular team meetings? Are there briefings and things that the team itself goes through so that they can keep everybody on the same page? I also suggest here a couple of questions that those team meetings might cover. What do we know, what's going to happen, what is happening now, and so on. So that's coordination. The second key principle for putting a crisis plan together is being quick. We know that with the advent of iPhones and live Facebook feeds and that sort of thing, if somebody sees flames on the outside of your building, they will start broadcasting that before the media even gets there. Before you might even know that there's a fire happening in your building. So the speed with which people get information is accelerating even as we speak. However, there are some things that you can do to help keep up with that demand for information. First of all, you might anticipate questions that your publics or the media might have. Again, this goes back to the pre-crisis preparation that I was talking about a few moments ago. Do you have at your fingertips organizational facts, facts about the situation, things that are going on? How big is your collection? How long have you been an organization? What's the recent additions to the collection? What collections were housed and whatever structures were affected by the disaster? These are things that, again, you can put together. You can have a good intern over the summer. You can put together lists of the collections and things that you have that you can then distribute to people who might need that information in the disaster. You can prepare explanations for the operational responses. So exactly how do you freeze a book, for instance. I'm not sure I would be able to explain that, but you can talk to the people who would be helping you recover with that disaster in providing that service and write up a brief explanation that you could distribute to volunteers, patrons, etc. so that they could understand what's happening. But again, you can write this before the disaster strikes. A little more specific to the crisis response is something called a standby statement. This is when you have reporters or publics or whatever knocking at your door or calling you up, tweeting you and asking what's going on. This is something that you can use at an initial press conference or press briefing. It is basically a statement that you prepare ahead of time, announcing that, yes, we know there's a crisis and here's what we're going to do to communicate with you about it. It is enough to give the media that kind of information as a way of saying, okay, there's going to be some more coming and we know that something's happening and it buys you a little bit of time to find out exactly what's happening. I'll show you a standby statement here in a moment. And then finally, you need to be able to get the team together quickly. Anybody who has to make decisions and be on the ground responding, if it's possible for them to get there or to be in connection with you. As we mentioned before with the walkie-talkies or wireless phones, etc. And then finally have all your tools ready to go. One of the things I mentioned here is a dark website, which is not to say it's a depressing website or anything. It's basically a web page with emergency information on it. Contact numbers, steps to take, etc. That is kept on a server and not made live until a disaster actually strikes. And this is something that can be brought up when the emergency actually happened. A few years ago, quite a few years ago when the shuttle Challenger went down, my son who is actually now a pilot in the Navy was a big space fan and so we were watching it land and we went to NASA's website. We're getting ready to go somewhere, but we popped on NASA's website in one second. We read about the landing. Another second, the site went blank and then another page came up that said we've lost contact with the shuttle and initiated our emergency recovery plan. In an instant, they were able to tell people, okay, something is happening we'll keep you posted but we wanted to let you know that there's been an emergency. Let me show you an example of a standby statement. You can see it's pretty generic at this time at our institution, we're advised that a fire broke out. Based on this information, we've initiated our crisis communication and disaster recovery plan. We're going to issue media statements every hour on the half hour and a press center has been created in the cafeteria of the building three blocks from here. Notice what this does for you. It's a statement that you can keep in a file or on your phone and if you're stressful and you're still trying to make decisions it's something that can be said to the media and others to say, we know something's going on, we'll get information to you when we have it and that information will be gotten to you at this time. It gives you a way to channel your response and to control things a little bit without having to make many decisions. You fill in the details and you read it. Again, that can be a slight saver, particularly if you don't have a trained media person on staff to help you out. This is a sample I call in a whole page. It can also be seen as the beginnings of a dark website. This is from the Natural History Museum in England. It provides crisis information and the staff knows that this is the place they can go to to get accurate information about things that are going on. This particular page is kept live and they basically give you a status update that says, hey, nothing's happening right now but similar pages can be filled in populated with more information and kept dark until the need arises and there's a lot of designers out there who know how to create these websites and make them effective for folks. All right. I mentioned before the Kentucky Derby Museum they had a blog that they had started a few months before the disaster and the flood actually hit them. You can see that this is the initial response to the flood. Hey, we have something going on. We're going to begin to provide you updates here. You'll see off to the right that there are recent posts about when the museum is going to be closed and what parts of the Kentucky Derby what parts of the grounds are open, etc. So it was a quick way to get information to publics and also became a vehicle as the disaster unfolded to keep people off to date about what was happening. All right. This is another version of the site and I'll also invite you to take a look at the museum Kentucky Derby Museum flood response video. That's the video that's embedded here and unfortunately we can't play. There's a couple of things that it does very, very well that I hope that you pay attention to if you watch it. The first is, you know, the basic information that, you know, their communication director said hey, we're closed and this is why. But she also walks through the various things that the museum is doing to fix the problem, dry up all the water and fix the dry walls and everything with a lot of detail. You know, 600 feet of heated pipe with heated air going through to dry out all the areas that we had, for instance. She also shows some volunteers of work on the recovery of the actual artifacts in the museum and then gives a sense of the things that are happening. Toward the end, she also asked for the public support of a fundraising campaign to reopen the museum. So she kind of touches on a lot of the different things that we have covered and well covered throughout this webinar. Immediate information about what's happening, an idea of what the actual operational response is, an idea of when things are going to open again and places where the public can go to support and engage with the museum. Alright, so I encourage you to take a look at that. Not right now, but when you have the moment. The principle of good crisis communication is that it needs to be accurate. The principles of crisis communication throughout any crisis that you're dealing with is the one voice. There should be either one person or relatively few people who are the official communicators in the event of an emergency. That means your messages are going to be consistent. That means that there is one reliable person that the media and other people can go to for that information and it just helps keep things relatively clean. The challenge here with an ongoing disaster, especially something that stretches out over several days like a super storm or a hurricane or something is that that one person might get tired and so there might be a couple of people who can step into the breach and fill in. The other thing, frankly in a real emergency, a widespread regional disaster, that one person might not be able to get into a place where they can actually report to people and update folks. So you might want to have one or two people who are trained to be the voice of the organization. You get facts from whomever you can, first responders, investigators, the people who are helping you recover and you check those facts and make sure they're accurate before you report them. You don't want to say, oh my god, I think the whole thing is wiped out in the middle of this because if the whole museum is not wiped out, that would be an inaccurate statement, cause more panic and fear and upset than a more accurate statement. To the extent that you can, you try to control the channels through which information is going. This is the toughest thing of all to do in an era of social media. I mentioned the person with the iPhone can go live and say, hey, here's what's happening at this place. However, to the extent that you can talk to your volunteers and anybody cleaning things up beforehand and say, if a reporter asks you a question, please check with one of us before you give an answer. If any of your employees have access to social media and even the people who manage social media, you might want to breathe them on the policies that you have in terms of checking information, getting messages sanctioned before they go out. Again, to make sure that the information represents the organization accurately and isn't doing anything that might get you into trouble a little bit later. You need to let everyone know, and this is a tough thing for we know what all is to do. Let everyone know what you don't know. If they ask you a question and you do not have the answer to that, say that. And then say, we will get back to you with the accurate information as soon as we can get it. Don't speculate or blame. A few years ago the Philadelphia zoo had a horrible fire. This goes back a number of years right around Christmas time. It affected the gorillas, the primate exhibit in several of the animals lost their lives. Well, the zoo management held a press conference the following day and basically blamed the security guards for not monitoring the fire system. The security guards had their own press conference the day after that and said hey, we've been telling them the security system, the fire suppression and detection system sucks and hasn't broken for months now. And so you can imagine what the media focused on after that. The point here is that you don't want to blame anybody. You don't want to speculate about what might have caused things until you have facts. And then if there are any rumors out there about things that are happening you should correct those as quickly as possible. Either through official media channels or through your own social and organizational media. That it needs to be ongoing so that you need to be prepared to keep people updated about things that are happening even when the TV cameras go off and the reporters have put their notepads away. Your staff, your volunteers, your patrons are going to want to know what's going on. You might want to monitor the media if you have a volunteer or a person who works on staff and in marketing. They might want to pay attention to what the media is reporting again to make sure that there's no inaccurate information out there. And then monitor social media. We know how rumors can get started. We've all heard about fake news and exaggerated claims and those sorts of things. If there is a way to monitor what people are saying about you and again to jump into the conversation if things are inaccurate then do that. I put the note here that all of these require resources and I know that you have a webinar coming up soon on how to acquire funding for some of these response things. If you can get a few pennies to throw at communication tools that would be helpful. Alright. One last principle and a couple of specific things about tools and then we'll begin to wrap things up here a little bit. You need to be human as much as you can. One of the big conversations in PR land has been about how you work with lawyers. Because from all the TV police procedurals that the first thing they tell you when they read you your rights is that you have the right to remain silent and anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. That's exactly the approach that lawyers take in crisis communication unless you have a conversation with them at a time. So for instance can you say I'm sorry that this has happened without being blamed? Well there's actually been heated conversations in crisis rooms that I've been in between lawyers saying no you can't say anything like that and people saying look I'm sorry that this thing is happening to all of us and we need so basically you want to err on the side of being human without getting your organization in trouble and having conversations with the lawyers ahead of time would help you. You should express empathy for anybody who's been affected by this. You should be honest and authentic in the things that you're saying. Again if you say I don't know something if the case is that you don't know anything you can say I don't know it. I'm being honest here. Don't fight with anybody in public again if there's a dispute over what happened and you're angry with somebody don't do that in public and then try not to panic. I know easier said than done at this point after talking about all these horrible things that can happen to you but you need to again you know people are going to be sad or upset if something has happened to something they hold dear like the things you have in your collections and you need to be sensitive to that in order to have a most effective crisis communication response. I want to talk a little bit about implementing the plantation it basically includes writing the plan down. You've come up with three tools and things you want to say you've had an intern prepare all the you know emergency responses you need to collect that somewhere where people can get to it. Once you've developed it you should announce hey we've developed this plan and and then share it as appropriately with anybody who might need to respond. Here at LaSalle a few years ago we had just come up with an emergency response plan to evacuate Dorans in case of an emergency it had been announced to the University it had been practiced and vetted and the gas main blew up just off campus spectacular 300 foot in the air flames. It was great we made the evening news that night but everybody knew what to do because they had been told about the plan and had practiced it. That goes to the next point practice the plan and tweak it so after running through it a little bit and seeing the things where there were things that need to be fixed make sure it gets adjusted. You might want to set up a date for periodically revising and updating the plan as well so you have the contact information for the person who moved out of the job four months ago that's not particularly useful. And then repeat it's needed and hope that you never need to do that by repeating I mean repeating the practicing and revising etc. Right? The plans typically have key contacts for the people who might have to respond some lines of authority for who gets to make decisions in the emergency and the sort of chain of command that might be in place a checklist or summary of major operational responses talking points that people would be able to read and distribute a checklist of statements and communication tools to implement a checklist of people to contact including support staff and recovery specialists so if you need to bring in an outside expert I'm going to guess that the Alliance for Response has you know protocols for these sorts of things as well. And then finally space and backup considerations. So where do you breathe the media and the public if you're building these in flames or underwater? Where do you take people? Is the website server in a place that you've flooded? And if it is then where do you have a backup server somewhere? We worked with some of the responders in California through the State University library system and I understand that they had backup servers in Arizona in case something happened. If phone services out where do people call for information? Again I understand that there are some agreements with other institutions that host sort of emergency phone lines for cultural folks alright. So all these are in the plant place where it won't be flooded. You have it on your phone you have it backed up, you have it in print you have it in places where people can get to it easily. And a webinar on tabletop exercises. I would just encourage you that once you have a plan in place that you do some practice with it in some large-scale regional situations there are drills that are coordinated by regional first responders. Sorry everyone it seems that we've lost Mike's audio for a quick moment but I believe that he's getting reconnected right now. Yep. And I am. Am I back? Okay great. You're back. Wonderful. Can you hear me alright? Yep sorry about that for some reason it bumps me off here every once in a while. So for example at LaSalle we've had some campus shooter drills where they've used actually my building as the emergency response area and again those have been helpful in terms of letting people know what might happen in an actual crisis. Tabletop simulations add some of the crisis communication components to those simulations as well. When I've done these with the seven hours that we did a few years ago for the cultural center we would toss in okay the reporter calls you about the situation at this point and you're hearing on the radio this is happening. Some social media went out that said you know it's this when in fact it's this disaster and then you can talk through what some of the responses might be through those situations. And finally testing the tools. Will your server handle triple the traffic for instance? How can you bulk up that resource ahead of time? Final thing and then we'll let Steve get to talking about his experience. The most important thing to post crisis recovery is to actually fix the problems. Obviously that sends the message that you know what you're doing and that the institution has been able to recover well. A couple of other things you might want to keep in mind. Keep telling people about it. Give progress updates on construction or reconstruction. You might want to declare an end to the crisis and hey we've fixed everything we're open for business and we're going to be bigger and better than ever. Then want to review your plan and prepare again. What did we do well? What lessons did we learn from doing this? And what can we do better in the future? Again I'll close with some examples from the Kentucky Derby Museum. Again that blog that I showed you before gave updates about the progress they made. They actually declared they made a fundraising campaign out of the recovery efforts. They were already planning to launch a capital campaign and what they actually wound up with was several times more than they expected because they were able to leverage the news about the crisis to help them raise more money. And then they had a launch party. A public relaunch of the Kentucky Derby Museum. This is a page from the Courier Journal which is the newspaper in Louisville at the time. One of the weblings that you have has a one year flood anniversary news story about what they had done. And it really does again exemplify that notion of declaring an end to the crisis and saying we've moved on and we're even bigger than that. This of course is a success story. Hopefully any disaster that you face ends as well as theirs did. But it really does illustrate some of the things that can happen after a crisis strikes. With that I'm going to guess that Jess has been collecting questions that you might have to talk about those a little bit later. I want to thank you for the time and I'm going to turn it over to Steve. Well thanks so much Mike, that was great. I think for my part I'd like to touch on these principles applied that if I could use a sports analogy you play the way you practice. And I can't emphasize that enough and you'd have pointed that out as well Mike that we really do need to plan specifically for how we might approach the communications aspect of any response that we're involved in. And those kind of facets of that would be to plan, to practice to apply, to review and then improve. And if you're taking that seriously you will very likely have a successful outcome as you are needing to dedicate your resources and your expertise at the time of need. So to look at what a deployment might mean and the communications aspect of that kind of effort I think you go back to looking at the beginning that once a coordinator and administrator determines that there's a real need to act to become involved in a sort of manner that there's going to be an incident action plan that's going to be developed but and what the team should be focused upon their goals are when they arrive on the scene is to assess and support they're going to be supporting the goals of the institution or collection that they're attempting to assist and the goals and priorities of Alliance for Response Network or support system that you're part of and in order to do that you're going to have to be able to report effectively you're going to be gathering that information and you're going to be pushing it forward in either direction there'll be a give and take depending on what the circumstances are and I think that that's different in almost every circumstance whether you're responding to an acute situation that might be very specific and contained or something that's more of a regional event they all have their challenges and the application of all of this is slightly different in each regard you're going to be following a plan that is set before you that facilitates those goals they would usually be a team leader and a team assigned to respond so that you're working in concert there's interaction between that small group in in the assessment and the support and the reporting component of a response and you'll usually find that the way it is best organized is for the team leader to set up a daily meeting point to review what's in the incident action plan and develop a method and assignment of responsibilities for the team during that particular day and you might also review the means and the times with which you might go about making those connections and passing information in one direction or another because you may be working together as a unit but you might be split up at times as well so that daily meeting point would be assigned and then project that depending on what the nature of the assignment is that you'd most likely be having an evening debriefing probably at the same staging area where you'll be generating reports and they'll all be funneled back to the team leader which will then pass that along to the coordinator who might most likely be off site for action and in preparation for that deployment you're going to want to have copies of those important documents that you may save as PDFs like the incident action plan which is going to have your contacts and your addresses you might download maps or upload maps or directions there will be report forms that you can use as prompts or actually as a more of a spreadsheet sort of a manner of being able to collect data that you can or information that you can feedback up the chain of command but whenever possible you're going to want to carry hard copies of all of the above whenever that's possible because you never know when electronics and digital media are going to conspire against you and you think that you have everything covered but during the day until you get back to your safe staging area you might not be able to access all of the things all those important documents using your digital equipment so based on the incident action plan you're going to determine a safe time and staging area for the briefing at the beginning of the day and I guess why I'm going back to that is that we want to follow the incident command structure and there being a chain of command because as Mike said you don't want to speak with multiple voices you'd like to be able to have assignments make assessments collect data information make determinations as to what kind of materials resources whether it's personnel or first specific materials that you might be able to apply to the tasks at hand and then meet at the staging area at the end of the day to pass that along now staging area can be anything but it's usually going to be some place where you're going to have it's certainly going to be safe it's going to if you can have electricity and be a safe place to meet up when that happens you may choose it to be a public space that has Wi-Fi for example we made good use of that in the Sandy deployment where we met up at a coffee shop it could be a Dunkin Donuts it could be a dedicated office in a school or an adjacent building that's nearby to the source of the event or it may just be in a tent adjacent but still on the grounds of the event now staying connected can really be a challenge you know I'm certain that there wasn't a member of our team in New York that didn't experience some degree of frustration with finding that they've used their phone battery so consistently throughout the day that at some point they ran out of juice and they either had to retreat to a point where they could charge their phone again or their tablet they just had to do without until they were able to meet up with another one of the team so you're going to be able to make use of a variety of communication devices depending on your location and circumstances they typically tend to be either your phone a tablet or on occasion maybe a walkie talkie will be the means that you have available it depends on the resources available to the group that you're working with on the ground and your group as well and I'd like to point out that what we've found is not all data is equal there's such a variety there's the text messaging phone calls, email servers wifi servers and they have their advantages some draw more battery than others do you make informed choices as to when you get in touch and when you make reports and you do want to stay online for periods of time when you're making reports and you may be doing that verbally and identifying what kind of resources you might want to bring to bear or recommend to bring to bear to be of help but in general you're going to try to keep it as simple as possible and dedicate those response times to expected times at the beginning of the morning perhaps at the lunch break and then again at the end of the day and that will keep it simple people know when to expect your call you're not wasting time trying to chase someone down and losing opportunities to be as effective as you really need to be and staying connected you might look at a variety of means of supplementing the energy that you have for your digital devices there are such a good variety of things that are out there some that are practical some that are just gimmicks but you need to make sure that you make some informed choices before you need to apply them and again if you're using this making use of these during practice times during the year that you'll become comfortable with what you can get away with and what you can't when you're out in the field and need to rely on the batteries for backup so key points in general I'd say are just to agree on methods of communication that's appropriate to the location circumstances you're going to have to have contingency plans backups you'll expect primary means of communication might be phone and it might be email but you may have to look at other workarounds like using text messaging which uses less data you might be able to use phone service that goes through wifi for example like google voice or skype depending on what's available and you're going to carry out carry and download all your essential documents carry your backup batteries and limit power use when available and you should be able to carry out all of the essential functions of your deployment and hopefully stay safe at the same time Jessica would you like to address some of the questions that have come up? Certainly thank you so much Steve and thank you to all of the audience for your patience and getting to the questions you can tell we had a lot of great content and slides to get through from Mike and Steve so we do appreciate your patience but if you do have any other questions do feel free to go ahead and pop those in the chat window on the left hand side of your screen we did have one come in while Mike was speaking specific to the Kentucky Derby Museum wondering if they have conservators on staff that was coming in from Celeste I will say I quickly checked it doesn't appear that they have any conservators who are members of AIC but Mike are you aware of any relationship that they might have had with you know outside conservators that were on contract or do you have any familiarity with what that setup was at the museum? I don't exactly know I do know that they in order to conduct some of the conservation efforts they contracted with one of the private vendors whose name I can't remember although if you look at some of the videos you'll actually see their trucks in the background and a lot of the collection was taken up to Chicago for conservation so that makes me think that they might not have had anybody on staff at least at that time and that they had relationships with outside private vendors to do that it certainly seems that way thank you all I see there's a little bit of activity happening in the chat box I wanted to just take a moment to reinforce some of the points made by both Mike and Steve I think you both did an excellent job of showing that a good crisis communications plan includes a lot of different audiences Steve I think very effectively spoke to the needs of those who are deployed to help assist either in the context of the national heritage or the folks who are going sort of out of their home base but also for those who are working more locally within their institution or their region what some of those needs might be and Mike of course did a wonderful job addressing multiple audiences in terms of the public and the press and just considering all of the different groups that we'll need to communicate with when we have limited means to do so and I just want to hammer home the point that Mike made very effectively the importance of training and encourage you all who weren't able to attend last week's session on doing tabletop exercises to please go ahead and view that program and think about some of the ways that you can conduct exercises on crisis communications related topics and put some of this content to good use so there's a question coming in from Stacy wondering she's curious if either of you come across communication plans that have emergencies classified in certain ways such as this is what we say during a small crisis, medium, large any type of different categorization that you've encountered I have seen a couple and again they don't really necessarily categorize it by small, medium, large but more of the these are the things that we can that can happen to us based on prioritization so for instance they might say here's a personality emergency somebody's been arrested for instance here is a fire emergency or a flood emergency because some of the procedures are very similar and so on I know that I have used actually a plan by the big brothers and big sisters of Colorado before and again it didn't deal much with large scale disaster response but more of the different types of crises that might happen to the organization so that's if you were to Google big brother, big sister crisis plan that would probably pop up and give you an example of that I will say it is complicated it's hard to cover everything I have seen people walking around with two-inch thick emergency binders of things not the most wieldy thing in the world but it was pretty comprehensive great thanks for that Mike so I don't see any other questions coming into the chat window at this point and we are getting close to the end of our our scheduled webinar session so I just wanted to take a moment here to give a few words in closing first of all I want to thank all of the audience today and Mike in particular for dealing with some of the technical issues we had it seems ironic that a crisis communications webinar would have issues with your audio getting disconnected and the computer calling into the program as well but I am grateful to you all for that for being patient with that so I just wanted to remind you all once again that we have a final program of this particular webinar series that's going to be on best practices for seeking funding and that will be Thursday at 1pm eastern time and to remind you all of course that the past sessions are on our YouTube channel if you have the opportunity to check those out I'm going to go ahead and share an evaluation for today's program please do take a few minutes to fill out this brief 10 questions survey information is incredibly valuable to us and will help shape future programming I want to again thank you all for taking the time to join us today and special thanks to our wonderful presenter and discussant Mike Smith and Steve Pine thanks Mike and Steve and of course we are really grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for making this series possible have a wonderful Tuesday and we hope to see you all on Thursday thanks so much again