094 – Crisis Communication Strategies for Non-Profits with John P. David

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Discover the game-changing strategies for managing and safeguarding your organization’s reputation in times of crisis.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. Hi, I’m your host David, and today we’re diving into the critical world of crisis communications with John P. David.

John’s expertise in crisis communication encompasses a wide spectrum, from managing media scrutiny, both earned and undeserved, to navigating sensitive situations like workplace violence and financial scams. His articles have been published in HuffPost and PR Daily. He’s also the author of “How to Protect (or Destroy) Your Reputation Online.” John, welcome to the show.

John P. David: Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think this is going to be a really great episode. We haven’t really talked much on the show about reputation management, and I think this is going to be a really great conversation.

So kicking off, how do you define what a communication crisis is? And isn’t this something that really like big companies should be focusing on?

John P. David: I think crisis is relative. It depends on the situation.

So I always say think about this. Let’s say that you go to your burger joint, right? National franchise, McDonald’s, Burger King, one of these national chains, right? And something happens. A mouse runs across the floor. Now that’s embarrassing for Burger King. And what may happen is that you may not go back to that Burger King.

You may tell your friends about what happened at the local Burger King, but it’s not going to be a problem for the people in Burger King headquarters for every one of their restaurants or for restaurants in Seattle or Portland or New York or any other place in the country or the world, right?

But if you go to your local family-owned bakery or deli and a mouse runs across the dining room, then you’ve got an existential crisis, right? So one’s embarrassing, one’s existential, same situation. It’s just a matter of the circumstance of the type of organization. And so I think every organization should be prepared because you just never know when something could happen.

Certain bigger companies have larger issues. Airlines have larger issues. Companies that have large exposure to the public, big retail stores, they have different levels of crisis. But smaller companies too should be thinking about it because you just never know when something will happen.

And I was thinking about this earlier today as well because we used to have, back in the good old days, from the generation that worked in an office all the time, it was easy to grab everybody and pull them together.

So if something was going on, you’d say, “We’re having a staff meeting in 20 minutes. We need everybody to meet in the conference room,” and you could say, “What’s going on?” And now you have people who are on different time zones, obviously different places. They might be down the street, but they’re working remotely.

And so it’s just all different sorts of challenges. And so I think every organization needs to be thinking about what can go wrong and what can happen when you do, by your own fault or by happenstance, get yourself into trouble.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I remember my wife and I, we were at a restaurant, and she ordered a salad. Cool, no problem. We’ve been to this restaurant a bazillion times. She gets a salad, she’s eating it, I’m eating whatever I was eating.

And then she’s like, “Is that a moth?” There’s a moth in her salad. And we couldn’t find a waiter or waitress, so she took it and went to the back and saw where they were and spoke to the manager. You’ll never guess what came out of his mouth.

John P. David: I’m gonna guess that he said, “Did you bring that in with you?” Or did you do that on purpose? Or did you…? Is it your fault? Or he said, “Oh, I’ve been looking for my moth.” That’s where he ended.

David Pisarek: No, he said, “Not again.”

John P. David: Oh, nice.

David Pisarek: Not again!

John P. David: Oh no, not again. “Not another moth,” right?

David Pisarek: Anyways, that was like a good ten years ago. Was that a big fatal thing? No, they’re still around. They’re still making money.

Now, when I was working at the hospital, we had a massive emergency crisis plan. I think it’s all relative to where you are, what you’re doing, who you’re serving.

If you imagine a hospital, anybody who is a first-line crisis intervention, police, ambulance, fire, or hospital doctor, that can be really, really damaging. Somebody falls, they break a bone, they die. So it’s really imperative to understand, I think, what the issues are that you could face and do some of that “what if” game.

John P. David: Yeah, absolutely. There’s room for that.

I mean, I would say if I were to give you kind of like the layout, the playbook, do you have the basic communications information? Do you have a media policy for your employees so they know what the rules are? If someone reaches out to them from the outside, from a media outlet, it’s as simple as putting together a one-page policy that says, “Here’s what you do in case of media outreach.”

And typically, that means you’re not a spokesperson for the company. If someone calls you from a media outlet, treat them with the utmost respect, tell them you’re not a spokesperson for the company, and tell them how to reach a person who can answer their question.

It’s not your job to try to field the call or try to find an answer for them. It’s your job to reach out and call someone higher up the chain. And if you have your own internal PR person, you need to call that person, or they need to call the CEO or the owner or whoever it is, the head of the organization.

And it’s also good to have outside counsel to have them on there too because they’re aware. And if you ask the question, and a lot of times media outlets call and they have silly questions, and their questions don’t make sense, and they’re barking up a tree kind of thing.

But the first thing is to have that sort of policy in place. If something does turn the wrong way, you’re at least aligned to try to deal with it versus having to go on the fly.

Or you find out the worst thing ever, and all of a sudden, there’s a story online, and they’re quoting one of your employees, and you’re like, “Why is that person in there? Are they in the story?” They happen to be out in the field, they happen to be at the event, they happen to be whatever.

And they didn’t know the rules of engagement because the media landscape has changed dramatically. There still are appropriate rules of engagement. So that’s the first thing is to have that policy in place. That’s as simple as putting something in your employee manual.

And yeah, maybe you have to get your lawyers to approve it, but something like that.

The second step is to make sure you have clear channels of communication with all your employees.

If something does go wrong, like what I was getting at before, you still just say, “Oh, okay, let’s go in the conference room.” We’re gonna say, “What’s going on?” Now you’ve got these remote workers all over the place, and people working different shifts, and some people don’t come in on Thursdays, and some people don’t come in on Fridays.

And so you have to have a way of making sure. And that might just be as simple as knowing how to send a company-wide email. Or if you’re on one of these other platforms (which I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about, but you know, there’s other platforms out there that people can be on).

And then the other kind of core thing is to identify who’s going to speak, know who that person is, know if that’s going to be the CEO or that’s going to be the managing director, whoever that’s going to be, or that’s going to be the PR spokesperson, or that’s going to be an outside consultant.

Because sometimes it’s easier for the outside person to deal with this crisis than it is for the internal person.

The bulk of it is thinking, “Okay, what are my vulnerabilities?” And most organizations, they know it. They know where an issue could arise. But in the non-profit world, what I would be concerned about is, “Okay, I’m prepared if there’s some type of fraud,” for example, or like your organization gave money to somebody who really didn’t deserve to get that money, right, that you got defrauded or something like that.

Or there’s like a rapid turnover in people. All of a sudden the CEO leaves under strange circumstances, or even just the CEO’s leaving, and we want to make sure we know what we’re talking about when he or she is going to be replaced.

And then the other issue is malfeasance. You read about it in all these organizations and non-profit organizations. They have money, right? They raise money, they distribute money, but they also have money. And a lot of times there’s malfeasance. And people steal from non-profits.

They steal from credit unions. As I said, we work with credit unions. Employees do bad things. Just because you’re working for a non-profit doesn’t mean that you have a pristine reputation as an individual.

And so you have to be prepared to sit there and say, “Okay, what would we do if something like this happened?” And then you go and sort of game it out a little bit. “Okay, we need to make sure we have a spokesperson. We need to make sure we want to have a message. We want to make sure that we’re contacting all our board members, reaching all of our advisory council people.”

Are we set up on a way to reach out to all of our vendors, our donors, or our targets? Because all of these things, if all of a sudden a non-profit finds out that they gave whatever, $25,000 to somebody who used it to fly to Europe instead of what it was supposed to be used for, then you’ve got a problem on your hands. You’ve got a whole issue.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I mean, it could even be maybe not as big as that, but maybe there’s a crazy snowstorm, ice storm, or heat wave, and you offer programs and services at your location, or you meet at a park. How can you connect with those people to tell them, “Hey, we’ve got some inclement weather, by the way, this is gonna be cancelled today,” or this week, or whatever it happens to be? It’s not crisis communications, although the first thing that comes to mind is media and something blowing up in the media.

But I think there’s also how you handle things internally with your employees. Maybe you’ve lost power at your facility, and you need to get in touch with everybody so that they know not to come in that day or whatever it happens to be. So I think there’s lots of different variables.

John P. David: Yeah, absolutely.

From an internal standpoint, you’re 100% correct that you have to be able to reach out and make sure that people understand, “Listen, we’re closed tomorrow because of the rain,” or the snow, or the hurricane where I live. It’s a really good primer, actually, for the unexpected. I’m in South Florida, and we have hurricanes.

And there’s a pretty set, preset rhythm to what happens when there’s a hurricane approaching.

First thing is that there’s all of this media attention about the hurricane in advance. And then the National Hurricane Center has these levels of warnings. And it gets to this point where they call a hurricane warning.

From there on in, everything is shut down. Hurricane warning means they’re expecting. The hurricane has the potential to hit you within two days. And that’s when the whole town shuts down and buildings shut down. So you can’t go into work even if you wanted to. The building’s shutting down. That’s when they start saying, “Don’t go to work, don’t be on the road, get home, get your act together,” all that stuff.

But at the same time, you do want to communicate with all your employees and let them know this crisis plan, the snowstorm plan, the hurricane plan, whatever plan, and “Here’s what you need to know.”

And then obviously you can sit there and say, “Oh, okay, well we sent that email out and we got 15% of them bounced back.” Well, that’s no good. Or phone calls or whatever you’re trying to do to reach your stakeholders. So those are all good kind of primers if something goes really sideways.

David Pisarek: Yeah. When I was at the hospital, one of the scenarios that we were in was, “What happens if there’s a bomb threat at another hospital and all people are diverted?” or “There’s an axe.” We were right near a major highway. Everything’s shut down and people can’t get in.

So there’s lots of different preparedness, I guess, that we can be doing and thinking about. I think from the non-profit space, catastrophic things like that are probably not really on the table but, you know, not necessarily off.

John P. David: Sure. No. I would say again that it’s a sort of plan for the best, and prepare for the worst sort of thing.

And like I said it’s all relative, meaning there’s a big difference between workplace violence and there’s an embezzlement or some kind of financial issue.

You know those are vastly different. One could be existential and the other not. But I think if you prepare, in other words, just lay the groundwork so that you’re prepared in case something happens. That’s really the big thing.

And then a lot of times what happens is there’s a lot of misinformation out there and misinformation as old as time. You know, this is not a new thing. This is people, the old telephone game, it’s like there’s something happening and all of a sudden it looks like it might be larger than it really is.

Today, with the sort of 24-hour news cycle and everybody having a video recorder in their hand, there’s a lot of opportunity for things to turn around on you. So you have to be able to act quickly, and if you’re dealing with the traditional media, you have to understand how they operate.

I do crisis communications all the time. A lot of times, the end result is that a reporter who’s working on a story about a topic disappears because we made it disappear. And we didn’t make it disappear in a nefarious way. We made it disappear because we educated the reporter about what was actually happening.

And that person who’s whispering in their ear is not really telling the truth, or the story they got has a little bit of truth to it but is not 100% true. And what they’re acting on is not necessarily accurate.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think of crisis comms plans like insurance.

John P. David: Sure.

David Pisarek: You want to pay for insurance, hoping that you never need it, and you want to have a comms plan and a strategy.

Back in the day, there was a crisis comms binder that was five inches thick. You don’t need that anymore. It could be a series of Google Docs, spreadsheets, whatever it is, so that the people that are looking for the stuff when something happens, you’ve got it all documented and set aside there.

So leading into that, what can companies do to prepare for a crisis?

John P. David: Well, I think aside from having that basic framework of a plan is to really look at what vulnerabilities are out there and to think about, “What would we do if this happened?”

Sometimes it’s a little bit morbid or a little bit scarier, maybe even it sounds a little bit silly, but there are many scenarios that seem like they’re completely far-fetched, and then they actually end up happening.

So I think trying to figure out what would happen for white-collar type of organization, I would look at the issues that impact white-collar organizations. So it’s gonna be financial.

What happens if there’s a financial impropriety of some kind? And there’s data and privacy? If there is a hack and there’s a leak or there’s private information?

And then the other one is what happens if something goes wrong in the human capital world? If there’s a lawsuit, if there’s a harassment case, there’s employee misconduct, and then the extreme is what if workplace violence, active shooter, all those things. And 15 years ago, there wasn’t even a word for active shooter.

It happened. It was. We used to say somebody went postal because it used to happen to the post office, but now it’s part of the lexicon, and now they teach kids in school about, “What do you do?” I think all these things you just have to say, “Here’s our worst-case scenario. Here’s what we should do.”

And then just laying it out. “Here’s our primary spokesperson.” If that person’s not here, who’s next? And who’s next in line, who will approve any statements we give out? What’s our stated policy is that we’re going to communicate as best we can, make sure we know the phone numbers for the lawyers, make sure we know the numbers for the media outlets, having all those things prepared, just having everything in one spot because it does happen.

I represent a charitable organization that recently enacted one of its crisis communication plans. That was at the outset of the Hamas attacks on Israel. You’d sit there and say, “We’re going to be in a situation where things are just on their ear.” The potential is there.

You have plenty of examples out there of the worst cases. I was just watching the documentary about the Tour de France, which was also on Netflix. They were showing the old ESPN “30 for 30” with Lance Armstrong.

So imagine you were working with Livestrong, and then all of a sudden, you find out that, guess what? Lance Armstrong just went on Oprah and said he cheated. Right? So things can happen. And again, I don’t mean to be the doomsday guy. It’s not my personality but bad things can happen.

David Pisarek: Yeah. It’s sad and unfortunate when it happens, but we also need to know what to do in those situations.

And I think if you’re listening to this, you could probably sit down and do some brainstorming. What are some of these things? But I think it’s important to reach out to somebody that does this to go, “Hey, are we on the right path with this? What else should we be thinking of? Should we be thinking like Hollywood production? What could a writer imagine and come up with that could potentially affect us?”

You can certainly leverage AI to do some brainstorming around that. Give it a really awesome prompt, like “This is our organization, this is what we do, here’s who we are, here’s who we serve. We want to put together a crisis comms plan. What should we be thinking of?” and leverage it for that.

Actually building out the plan, having it all documented, that’s going to take time. It’s not going to happen overnight.

John P. David: Right. The good news is it’s not something that you have to develop in ten minutes and spend some time doing it.

I mean, obviously, you want to have something that’s available and have the basics ready to go.

I had a friend of mine who was in a jewelry store the first time I met him. He had a small space in an office building. And I said, “Well, this is secure up here.” He goes, “Yeah, it’s secure.” But he goes, “I can think of 20 ways in which somebody could rob me blind,” you know? And ironically, he moved it down to the street level, and he was next to a bank of all things, and the bad guys attempted to rob his jewelry store by ripping out the ATM machine in the bank and trying to get into his jewelry store, crazy as that sounds.

But the thing is that you have business people and people who run organizations. It’s their job to understand where their vulnerabilities are and so they know what their big issues are. And if they don’t know, you can, like I said, have those conversations and figure it out.

Now, the advantage is that if I can drift into the plugging area of the conversation and not just for me personally, but just in general, the value of having an outside consultant whose objective can help you with the planning. Can say, “Well, what about this? What about this? What about this?” These are things that maybe internal people wouldn’t be comfortable talking about.

An outside person can deal with the media in other ways. I represent companies, call and speak to reporters all the time, and they’re ready to go. They got the next Watergate right on their hands.

As an outside person, I can have a candid conversation with them where the ground rules are set, where it’s like, “Listen, I’m not a spokesperson for this organization. I know you called them. I’m calling you. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m trying to answer your questions. I’m here to help you. Help me help you.” And that’s really hard for an internal person. It’s very hard for them to call up a reporter and say, “I don’t know what’s going on.”

So it’s much easier for an outside person to be your liaison when dealing particularly with the traditional media. But at the same time (as you’re probably gonna ask me next) is that it goes from: there’s a lot more happening now than just the traditional media because obviously you have anybody with a cell phone has a video camera in it and you have video bloggers, you have just people who have their own Instagram channel, and they’re publishing whatever they want to publish. And so it gets trickier.

People create their own little media outlets and they don’t necessarily follow the traditional rules. That’s another issue that you have to deal with is that you have to realize that this may not break kind of the way you think it’s going to break. You have to really be prepared that even if you game it out the best you can, it’s going to take some twists and turns you weren’t prepared for.

David Pisarek: Yeah.

Further to that, I think it’s important for organizations to create Google alerts if they don’t have any set up. It’s free. Put your brand name in there, your organization, and things like that so that you can get emails if you’re mentioned.

Because, to your point, anybody and everybody can publish whatever they want. True or false doesn’t matter. They can go and do what they want.

I think it’s important for organizations to just be aware of what’s out there. Maybe it’s okay. This person, they have like three people following them on X or Twitter or wherever. We can ignore this, but just keep our eye on it. We’ll check back in a couple of days versus, “This is a mega issue.” We’re getting coverage by CNN like, “What is going on? How do we handle this type of thing?” So there’s very astute of it but I think there’s also the severity to different things that may or may not exist at the same time.

John P. David: Yeah, that’s a valuable point. With this microphone that everybody has, everyone’s microphone is not created equal.

So you’re right. Sometimes you have somebody saying something crazy and like you said, “They have 100 followers on Twitter.” And you look at that and go, “This guy’s got 100 followers on Twitter and he’s not speaking with anything substantial. I’m not really going to worry about it.”

But if some major influencer who has a million followers retweets it, then you’ve got an issue potentially on your hands. And that’s true.

And listen, sometimes something happens, and it’s bad, but it feels worse on the inside than it looks from the outside.

And that happens on occasion. I had a client mentioned in a documentary film, and there was no flattering portrayal of this company. And when they first heard about it, they were livid.

They were like, “This is besmirching a brand and everything else. It’s like the director is going to go all around the country and play this documentary, and it’s going to be in film festivals, and it’s going to be everywhere, and we’re going to have to deal with this for the next two years.”

And I said, “Wait, just slow down for a second. Let’s try to figure out what’s going on here. This film’s been in the works. Do we know this was coming out? How did this all of a sudden become a huge problem? How do we not know about this?” And then what it ended up turning out to be is that it was a much smaller deal. It was not as big of a story. The film actually had been out for six months. It hadn’t gotten any traction. The story was the whole arc, and I’m the jaded PR guy talking about my client, but I felt like the arc of the whole documentary made no sense, you know?

And so whenever we were talking to somebody, we would say, “Listen, their whole thesis, it doesn’t make sense.” And so there was a massive panic for a couple of days and then everybody calmed down because it just wasn’t as bad as they thought it was going to be.

But you should still keep an eye on it because you never know. And something could go viral, as we say.

David Pisarek: So what can companies, organizations, businesses do to develop plans and protocols to engage with media, influencers, stakeholders during a crisis? Are there any best practices or platforms that you would suggest?

John P. David: Well, I think the first thing is, if you’re not on the social media platforms, you should be. If something does happen and you want to comment on it, you know it’s much better to come from your official Twitter/X account, your official Facebook page, or your official Instagram account. You know, you’re able actually to communicate.

So I think it’s important that if you’re still one of those companies that says, “I don’t believe in all this stuff,” here’s just another reason why you should have it.

You don’t have to sit there and spend a ton of time on it, but you should at least have the appropriate accounts so you can actually communicate because you’re right. All your audiences they’re not on your email list, right? And they’re not all on the same social channels. And everyone’s getting information in different ways.

There was a time when we got lots of information from broadcast TV, and then it was cable TV. Now, nobody watches live TV anymore except for sports and breaking news. And you know, people are getting their news from their phones, TikTok, Instagram, and things like that.

So I think it’s important to be prepared if you need to communicate something. You should be able to use the social channels, which might mean being prepared to do some sponsored posts and paid posts that will help you get the reach that you’re required to have in today’s world because obviously, one tweet is just one tweet.

David Pisarek: I think there’s also a level of transparency that you need to figure out what’s right for your business.

I don’t think that you should be out there saying, “Oh, this didn’t happen,” because at some point somebody, as you said, is gonna have a video of something that actually did happen, and it’s gonna refute whatever you’re claiming. So be honest and transparent.

And I think that’s also gonna build a bigger level of trust with your constituents, your donors, your supporters, whoever it happens to be when, “Look, yes, this did happen. Here’s what we did. Here’s how we went about rectifying, fixing, remediating, firing. We can’t talk about this because it’s an active police investigation.” Like things like that really helped build trust. Right?

John P. David: Yeah. You’re 100% correct.

You don’t want to be the no-comment organization, but you can be the organization that says, “We’re addressing these complaints, talking to our legal counsel, or dealing with this internally, and we don’t have anything further to tell you other than that.”

But that’s what we’re doing. We’re communicating with our people and our stakeholders, and we’re working to remedy the situation.

And you know, in almost every situation, that’s going to be better than we couldn’t reach them for comment.

And the other thing is that you don’t want to just be a no-comment type of organization because that’s the way you’ll be forever. Meaning that the media won’t even reach out to you the next time. They’re not expecting anything to happen. And you want to keep those channels open because if something does turn, you want to be able to have a regular conversation with someone.

I think what a lot of folks don’t understand when dealing with, again, like the traditional media is that you can talk to them. You don’t have to tell them everything that’s going on and you don’t even have to give them anything that they can use.

But you can have a conversation and say, “Okay, this happened, something bad happened. We’re not going to talk about it involving a minor. It involved a very private situation. It involved this. So we don’t have a comment on it.” So you can say, “No comment,” but I’m telling you it’s not because we don’t want to talk about it. It’s because it’s not appropriate for us to talk about it. That goes a lot further than just, “Yeah, we have no comment,” you know?

David Pisarek: Yeah. And to that point, the media are constantly looking for experts on things.

If you have a relationship where you’re open, you’re honest, you’re transparent, you can’t talk about it because x, y, z, they might come to you for a totally different reason. That’ll show a positive light on your organization or yourself or whatever you’re doing because there’s something else happening in the media that’s like a good story of some kind.

And they want your opinion, your thoughts, your leadership around whatever that happens to be. And so you shouldn’t just write it off because I think there’s other pieces that can come to fruition from it. Will it always happen? No. Maybe one-in-a-million chance. One in a thousand?

John P. David: Your point is well made. Because there’s no downside to having a positive relationship with another person in business or in the media or anything. There’s no downside to that.

Is it likely that someone’s from NBC Nightly News who’s sticking a camera in your face over something, that they’re going to want to come back next week and talk about your ice cream social? Probably not, but it’s better to have a positive interaction than a negative one. And again, that’s how you build relationships, particularly locally if you deal with local media.

David Pisarek: John, this has been an awesome conversation—super insightful. I’ve got some stuff to take back to my team so we can chat about what we need to do in my agency. I’ll also have some conversations with some of our clients about, “Hey, have you thought about this?”

So thank you so much for your advice, thoughts, and leadership around this and other bigger things that happen in terms of managing communications crises. So I’m curious: if anybody wants to connect with you if they want some help or support, and if they want to ask you some questions, what do they need to do?

John P. David: Sure. My website is davidpr.com, and I’m easy to connect with, so I’m always open to talking to folks.

I mean, part of what happens in crisis is that there’s a triage phase and what’s exactly going on. And I’m always open to help people out. If I can’t help them, I’ll try to point them in the right direction as best I can.

So, I mean, that’s the first place to go to my website, davidpr.com, and there are several different ways of reaching out and connecting with me there.

David Pisarek: So no affiliation. Yes, I’m a David but I am not David PR. John is davidpr.com.

Look, if all you do is get John’s contact info and put it in your virtual Rolodex. Maybe I’m dating myself a little bit by saying that. Put in your contacts in case you do need some support at some time. I think that’s a win for sure right there.

John, thanks again for being here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

Everybody listening, if you want links to anything that we’ve talked about or to review the transcript, we posted up on our show notes page. Just head over to nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com, click on this episode for all the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful!