It’s just another day in the life: your program staff is going about its business, doing their jobs, living the mission of the organization. Your development staff is also “living the dream,” making connections, reaching towards goal, and signing pledges. And then, from LITERALLY out of the blue, an issue crops up and you’ve made the news, and NOT in a good way. Well beyond your pay grade, suddenly you’ve got a black mark on your otherwise stellar reputation. Everyone (especially the outward-facing departments, which includes development) has to swim upstream.
Here’s two starkly different ways to handle a PR “issue,” and keep it from escalating into a PR ”nightmare.” Case in point: my local Columbus Zoo vs. Cedar Point amusement park upstate.
The Zoo’s board and staff have for months been grappling with a mess that they didn’t see coming, at the highest levels of the organization. They’re splashed all across the news. What do they do —specifically the development team?
They make it a point to make its donors/members aware of upcoming or breaking news, in advance of it happening. They offer transparency, empathy, understanding, and approachability. In this way, no one can say they have an issue with being left out of the conversation, no one can say they’ve been disrespected.
Columbus Zoo and Aquarium investigation forensic audit reports (dispatch.com)
On the flip side, there’s Cedar Point — albeit a for-profit corporation, but their handling of their recent news story is a cautionary tale for all of us in non-profits as well.
Cedar Point: Park officials mum about seriously injured guest (dispatch.com)
Cedar Point has been evading an explanation of the incident involving a guest that was “seriously injured” when a piece of metal flew off one of their park’s rides and struck her in the head. A week has passed and they’ve issued only deflecting statements. They’ve offered no details, and said only that the matter is under “internal investigation.” Does anybody else read that to mean “we’re figuring out how to protect ourselves, not let the seriousness of this matter leak, and release only partial factoids that don’t insinuate us”??? And figuring out who THEY can sue?
But cloaking the matter in mystery just leaves us to conjecture what happened, to whom, how bad it was, what’s being done about it, and what’s unfolding next. That kind of wondering only escalates in the minds of the public about what the hell is going on, who’s being paid off to stay quiet, and what is (or isn’t) being done to protect the public from it ever happening again. In other words, they’ve compounded their PR “nightmare.”
So, I say: think about the unthinkable now. When life hasn’t handed you those lemons yet, when your head is clear and you and your team can conjecture free of the burden of the moment, put your Best Practices hats on and develop a framework for dealing with crisis. Review your conflict-of-interest policy and disclosure statements (you have those, right?) and make sure your board has conducted a formal, written assessment of the CEO in the past 12 months (and of itself in the past 36 months), and has written agreements about their own roles, responsibilities, and expectations.
That way, if you’re going about your business, and the unthinkable happens, you won’t be gob-smacked, you will have brushed up on your AFP Code of Ethics, you will have a clear path to keep your donors well-informed, and you can emerge as unscathed as humanly possible. You know what to do when the fire alarm rings, so figure out what to do when a different kind of catastrophe befalls your organization. Let your North Star be the rules and regs you know (and you know I know you know) and have been following all this time anyway. It’s just that it’s easy (tempting?) to be pulled off course and fall down the rabbit hole of deceit and deception — but make that plan and you will not have to wonder what to do when calamity befalls you.
And it’s going to be not just a good plan for work, but a great plan for Life too.
