You may know the feeling.
A board member texts you a link to a story with no context. A staff situation that seemed contained suddenly isn’t. A funding partner gets caught up in something that has nothing to do with you, but your name is in the same sentence. A neighbor posts something inflammatory about your facility, and it starts to gain traction.
These scenarios are not hypothetical.
Most nonprofit executives have a version of one of these stories, and some have more than one. The question isn’t really whether something will happen. It’s whether you’ll be ready when it does.
The good news is that ready doesn’t mean perfect.
You don’t need a shelf full of crisis manuals nobody will read or a budget line for a PR retainer you can’t afford. In most cases, it means having thought through the right things before the phone rings, so that when it does, you’re not starting from zero.
And if you’ve been doing your job well (building community trust, engaging your board, cultivating partners, communicating consistently), you’re already further along than you think.
In this post, we walk through five things every nonprofit executive should do before a crisis hits: Identify your crisis team, map your vulnerabilities, plan your first steps, draft your key messages, and decide who speaks. None of them are complicated. But all of them require doing the work now.
Nonprofit crisis preparedness starts with good management
The organizations that handle crises well aren’t the ones with the biggest communications budgets or the most experienced PR firms on speed dial. They’re the ones that are well run.
Think about what a crisis plan actually requires: clarity about who does what, honest assessment of where you’re vulnerable, consistent communication, and leadership that can make decisions under pressure.
Those aren’t crisis management skills. They’re organizational health skills.
If your board is engaged, your roles are clear, your communications are consistent, and your community relationships are strong, you have the foundation of a crisis plan already. Perhaps you just haven’t written it down yet.
The reverse is also true.
No crisis plan will compensate for a board that’s disengaged, a staff that doesn’t know who’s in charge, or a community that doesn’t know who you are. When something goes wrong, you draw on what you’ve built. If you haven’t built much, there’s nothing to draw on.
“Do an asset check of what your advantages are and play from your strengths.” — Lee Wochner
The work you’re already doing, the fundraising, the community outreach, the donor communications, the board cultivation, isn’t separate from crisis preparedness. It is crisis preparedness. Every relationship you build, every honest communication you send, every promise you keep is a deposit in a goodwill account you may one day need to draw from.
How nonprofits can prepare for a PR crisis before it happens
In a recent episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, PR veteran Mike Swenson walked our CEO Lee Wochner, a former newspaper editor and reporter, through the framework he developed over more than 30 years advising nonprofits and corporations through crises. Mike, who began his career as a broadcast journalist and later served as press secretary to a Kansas governor, has sat on every side of the table. He knows how reporters think, how stories spread, and what separates organizations that come out of a crisis stronger from those that don’t.
Mike’s process, called Crisis Trak, comes down to five things. Not one of them is complicated. But all of them require doing the work before anything goes wrong.
Step 1: Build your nonprofit crisis communications team in advance
When something happens, you can’t manage it alone. Mike recommends identifying a crisis team drawn from across your organization’s major functions before you ever need one.
“If you look only at your staff, you may seem lean. But look at all the support you have. You have a wider network than you think.” — Mike Swenson
For a small nonprofit, that might be everyone on staff. For a larger one, it’s a representative from each key area. The point is that when the phone rings, you’re not spending the first two hours tracking people down. You already know who to call, and they already know they’re on the team.
If you can, identify a secondary group to keep day-to-day operations running while the crisis team is focused on the situation at hand. In lean nonprofits, that can be hard, but even a loose plan is better than none.
Step 2: Identify your nonprofit’s vulnerabilities before a crisis hits
This is the exercise most organizations skip, and it’s the most valuable one. Mike asks every member of the crisis team to come to a planning session with a list of everything they think could go wrong. Financial issues, personnel situations, volunteer incidents, a funding partner caught up in controversy, a neighbor with a grievance that gains traction online. Every function sees different risks, and the combined list is almost always longer and more varied than any one person anticipated.
Getting it all on the wall, literally, is the moment when people stop thinking of crisis planning as a theoretical exercise. Any one of those things could bring your organization to a halt if it’s not managed well. That’s a clarifying moment.
Step 3: Map your nonprofit’s first steps in a crisis
Every crisis is different, but the opening moves are surprisingly consistent. Mike recommends mapping the first few steps your organization would take, drawing on a real situation you’ve already navigated. What happened? What did you do first? What should you have done faster? Where were the gaps?
The goal is to have a sequence ready so that in the first chaotic minutes, nobody is asking what to do next. You already know. Think of it the way a football team thinks about its opening plays. You don’t script the whole game, but you know exactly how you’re starting.
Step 4: Draft your nonprofit crisis messaging before you need it
This is where most organizations are most unprepared. Mike recommends building three to five key messages for each risk on your list, before anything happens. Not press releases, not full statements, just the core things you would need to communicate for each type of situation.
When something goes wrong, the instinct is to gather everyone in a room and figure out what to say. That takes time you don’t have. If your messages are already drafted, you pull them out, shape them into a paragraph, post them to your website and social channels, and send a press release. The first message out is simple: something is happening, here is what we are doing about it, and we will keep you informed. That alone puts you on offense.
Step 5: Assign clear crisis communication roles at your nonprofit
The head of your organization needs to be visible at key moments in a crisis. But someone also needs to be focused on communication hour by hour, managing the message and dealing with media and stakeholders in real time. Those are two different roles. Decide in advance who fills each one.
Mike’s full Crisis Trak process, including videos that guide your team through building your own plan, is available at crisistrak.com. If you want to hear him explain the framework in his own words, listen here.
How nonprofit community trust becomes your crisis advantage
Here’s something most nonprofit executives don’t fully appreciate until they need it: You start every crisis from a stronger position than almost any corporation does.
“Nonprofits often begin with a savings account of goodwill that a for-profit company has to spend years earning.” — Mike Swenson
Businesses spend years trying to earn the kind of community trust that nonprofits build as a matter of course. Your donors believe in your mission. Your volunteers give their time because they care. Your board members are civic leaders who have staked some of their own reputation on yours. Your corporate partners chose to associate with you because it reflects well on them. That’s an active network of people who, if you ask them, will show up for you.
Mike makes this point directly in the episode, and it’s worth sitting with. In a crisis, your board isn’t just a governance body. They’re community voices who can say publicly that they stand behind you. Your corporate partners aren’t just funders. They’re third-party validators who can vouch for your integrity at the moment it’s most in question. Your volunteers aren’t just helpers. They’re ambassadors who can carry your message into conversations you’ll never be part of.
The catch is that you have to ask.
Most nonprofit leaders, under pressure, look at their lean staff and feel exposed. Mike’s reframe is simple: Stop looking only at your staff. Look at everyone connected to your organization. You have more support than you think, and a crisis is exactly the moment to use it.
There’s a sharper edge to this worth acknowledging.
The same mission-driven identity that makes a nonprofit scandal feel like a bigger betrayal is also what gets you forgiven faster, if you handle it right. People hold you to a higher standard because they believe in what you do. That same belief is what brings them back when you demonstrate that your values hold under pressure.
“You can come out of a crisis stronger than you went in, if you manage it right.” — Mike Swenson
The organizations that come out of a crisis stronger aren’t the ones that avoided scrutiny. They’re the ones that showed, when it mattered, that they meant what they said.
Nonprofit crisis readiness: questions to ask yourself now
You don’t need a crisis to be brewing to make this worth your time. Set aside some time this week and sit with these questions honestly.
- If the phone rang at 3 a.m. tonight, who would you call first?
- Does that person know they’re your first call?
- Does your organization have a crisis team identified, even informally?
- When did you last think seriously about what could go wrong, and whose perspective did you include?
- Do you have even a rough sense of what you would say in the first hour of a crisis, for even one or two of your most likely scenarios?
- And who in your organization is responsible for communication when things get hard?
If the answers come easily, you’re in good shape. If they don’t, that’s useful information, and the good news is that getting ready doesn’t require a large budget or a long timeline. It requires a room, the right people, and a few hours of honest conversation.
Frequently asked questions
What is a nonprofit PR crisis?
A nonprofit PR crisis is any situation that threatens your organization’s reputation, relationships, or ability to operate. It can involve financial issues, personnel matters, volunteer incidents, or problems caused by a partner or funder you had no control over. It doesn’t have to be dramatic to be serious. Small situations that are mishandled or ignored can grow quickly, especially in a social media environment where there is no news cycle and no time to catch up.
How do nonprofits prepare for a PR crisis?
The most effective preparation comes down to five things: identifying your crisis team before you need one, mapping your organization’s vulnerabilities, planning your first steps in advance, drafting key messages for your most likely scenarios, and deciding who will speak publicly. None of these require a large budget or an outside PR firm. They require a room, the right people, and a few hours of honest conversation.
What should a nonprofit do first when a crisis hits?
Activate your crisis team. If you’ve prepared, you already know who that is, and they already know they’re on it. If you haven’t prepared, your first task is assembling that group, which can cost you hours you don’t have. Either way, you cannot manage a crisis alone. Get the right people together as quickly as possible and establish who is doing what.
Do small nonprofits need a crisis communications plan?
Larger organizations can pull staff off their regular work to manage a crisis. Smaller ones usually can’t, which makes advance planning even more valuable. A crisis plan doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be a single document that identifies your team, your risks, your first steps, and your key messages. The organizations that handle crises well are usually just well-run organizations that thought things through in advance.
What is Crisis Trak and how can it help our nonprofit?
Crisis Trak is a five-step crisis preparedness framework developed by PR veteran Mike Swenson over more than 30 years of advising nonprofits and corporations. The process walks organizations through building a crisis team, identifying vulnerabilities, mapping response steps, drafting key messages, and assigning a spokesperson. Videos that guide you through building your own Crisis Trak plan are available at crisistrak.com.
How are nonprofit PR crises different from corporate ones?
The situations are more similar than different. The key distinction is that nonprofits typically start a crisis with more community goodwill than a corporation does. Your donors, volunteers, board members, and corporate partners already believe in your mission. That network is a genuine asset in a crisis if you’ve been building and maintaining those relationships all along. The flip side is that nonprofits often have fewer staff resources to dedicate to crisis response, which makes preparation more important, not less.
What should a nonprofit say when a crisis first breaks?
Your first public message doesn’t need to say everything. It needs to say three things: something is happening, here is what we are doing about it, and we will keep you informed. Getting that message out quickly, before the narrative forms without you, is more important than getting every detail right in the first hour. If you’ve drafted key messages in advance for your most likely scenarios, you can have something ready to post within minutes.
Can a nonprofit actually come out of a crisis stronger?
Yes, and it happens more often than people expect. Organizations that handle crises with transparency, consistency, and clear communication tend to strengthen the relationships that matter most. Your supporters are often more forgiving than you fear, because they believed in your mission before the crisis and they’re looking for a reason to keep believing in it. What brings them back is seeing that your values hold under pressure.
How do we know what our biggest crisis risks are?
Bring your team together and ask everyone to come with a list of everything they think could go wrong. Financial issues, personnel situations, volunteer incidents, neighbor disputes, a partner caught up in controversy. Every function sees different risks, and the combined list is almost always longer and more varied than any one person anticipated. Putting it all on the wall is often the moment people stop thinking of crisis planning as theoretical and start taking it seriously.
How often should a nonprofit revisit its crisis plan?
Once a quarter is a practical goal. Use that meeting to do two things: Review any situations from the past three months and assess how they were handled, and scan the horizon for new risks that weren’t on your original list. When crisis planning becomes a regular agenda item rather than a one-time exercise, it stops feeling like extra work and becomes part of how your organization stays healthy.