Are You Prepared for the Eye of the Storm?
Posted by MillsCommGroup in Articles
If you’ve been paying attention to the tragic BP oil spill news, you may have read this Chronicle of Philanthropy article about the controversy behind the Nature Conservancy (TNC) accepting funding from BP before the oil spill. Whatever your opinion on the matter, it raises a really good question for nonprofits: Would you be prepared to handle it if your organization was at the center of a controversy?
Engaging stakeholders is a must-do during a crisis. In order to effectively engage, you’ve got to actively monitor what is being said about your organization online and in print. According to the Chronicle article, “[Nature Conservancy] employees have been monitoring the discussion closely and responding to criticism.” Indeed they have and we can learn a thing or two from them.
Here are two examples of how the Nature Conservancy engaged really effectively with stakeholders:
1. On their blog, they held an interview about the BP oil spill with TNC’s leadership team. Leadership answered a lot of questions. A lot. Some were submitted in advance and some were taken real-time. It’s worth listening to and/or reading the transcript.
2. On Twitter, the Nature Conservancy has been reaching out to people tweeting about the issue: “@rotkapchen @lurainpenny @centregcs: For more info on #oilspill & BP see the transcript of the live chat w/our CEO http://nature.ly/dre53k”
Last week at the Seattle NDOA conference, Debbie Marchione of the Alford Group led a conversation about the various real-life ethical dilemmas that organizations can face in the online world. During the session, participants talked about ways their organizations manage the risks. At the end of the day, things can go wrong and unexpected things can happen. You could accept a donation that becomes controversial and have an explosion of negative comments and criticisms about your organization. But more likely it’ll be something slightly less dramatic. Perhaps a disgruntled volunteer could post some negative comments on your Facebook fan page or a donor could Tweet nasty things about how much you spend on “overhead”. Yes, that would be somewhat scary and demoralizing. Mind you, those people could say something negative to friends at the local country club and you’d be none the wiser. You can’t control what people say; you can control how your organization responds, particularly when it comes to social media.
To get started, plan to talk about this as a team. Here’s a great tool to help you get started that offers an ethical framework for your social media efforts, and you can use it as a starting place for a broader crisis communications policy.
And, by the way, this is another great reason to setup a listening station and start dipping a toe in the social media world to find out who is talking about you.
Has anybody got a policy they’d like to share? Share them here.
