When the phone rings at 3 a.m., the story is out, and a narrative is forming. What you do in the next five minutes may be the most important thing you ever do for your organization.
PR veteran Mike Swenson, who spent more than 30 years advising nonprofits and corporations through crises, says the organizations that come out stronger are almost always the ones that were ready before anything started.
Most organizations make the same mistake: They react instead of responding. In the age of social media, the difference can be fatal to your reputation.
Here’s what prepared organizations do differently: Before any crisis arrives, they identify a crisis team drawn from across the organization, map every plausible risk, establish the first seven steps they’ll take, build three to five key messages for each potential scenario, and designate a spokesperson. When the phone rings, there’s no scrambling. The team is already assembling, the first message is already drafted, and the organization is on offense within minutes rather than hours.
Nonprofits have a real advantage in a crisis that most executives underestimate: goodwill.
Years of community trust, a board of engaged civic leaders, corporate partners, and loyal volunteers are assets that can actively carry an organization through a difficult moment, if leadership knows how to activate them. (There’s a sharper edge to this: 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.)
Mike also makes the case for measured response over reflexive action. When a named person or associated organization gets caught up in a public controversy, pausing before acting (gathering information before making a final call) is almost always better than a quick decision you can’t walk back.
The fundamentals of good crisis communication haven’t changed: Be authentic, be succinct, and repeat your message more times than feels comfortable.
What has changed is the speed at which you have to do all of it. And whether you’re navigating a crisis or just trying to communicate more effectively every day, those three principles are a good place to start.
Mike brings a perspective few crisis advisors have. He spent years as a broadcast journalist and television reporter before serving as press secretary to a governor, which means he has sat on every side of the table. He knows how reporters think, how politicians survive, and how organizations fall apart when they aren’t prepared.
The media environment makes all of this harder than it used to be. Newsrooms are a fraction of what they were, reporters are stretched across multiple states, and the old news cycle (morning paper, evening broadcast) is gone. The story moves whether you’re ready or not.
The good news is that getting ready doesn’t have to be complicated.
Mike Swenson developed a simple five-step process called Crisis Track, and in this episode, he walks former newspaper editor and reporter Lee Wochner through how it works and where you can go to put it into practice for your own organization. Any nonprofit, regardless of size or budget, can build a plan.
So if the phone rings at 3 a.m., you’re already on offense.
Links: https://crisistrak.com
Lee Wochner:
Better safe than sorry. That’s the message of this episode and it’s one we all need to hear. You’re putting your nonprofit’s story out there on social media, in emails, at events, on video and more. You have to. It’s how you get donors, volunteers, teammates, board members and funders through the door. But visibility comes with risk. One wrong move and you’re dealing with a PR crisis.
Or worse, you get pulled into someone else’s scandal. The good news? A little prep work goes a long way as we’ll learn and enables you to focus on your positives. Today’s guest, Mike Swenson, has spent decades guiding governors, elected officials, and nonprofits through some seriously rough waters. He’s here with advice on how to tell your story confidently and handle it well when things go sideways on this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit.
Jaclyn Uloth:
Welcome to How to Market Your Nonprofit, the Counterintuity podcast featuring interviews with experts in marketing, fundraising, strategy, and leadership who offer how-tos and inspiration about how you can help your nonprofit succeed and grow during a time of chaos and change. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience in marketing, strategy, and nonprofit management, here’s our host, Lee Wochner.
Lee Wochner:
Mike, it’s nice to have you as a guest today. Thank you for joining us.
Mike Swenson:
Thank you, Lee. Appreciate the opportunity.
Lee Wochner:
Usually we focus on growth on this show, but if you hit a speed bump, you’ve got a problem that inhibits growth. And we live in this social media age where if you do or say the wrong thing, you’re in a PR crisis. You are an expert at dealing with PR crises, so this seems like a really good time to have you on.
Mike Swenson:
Well, thank you. It’s important, and I’m glad that you focus in the world of nonprofits because we had a lot of experience in the PR firm that I ran for many years with nonprofits—both as partners with our corporate clients through cause marketing, and eventually being hired by many nonprofits locally as well as nationally. Crisis was always important because something is going to happen to every organization at some point. To think otherwise is naive.
Lee Wochner:
We’ve done some PR recently. We’ve always done a little bit, but in December we did some PR that got international publicity very effectively for a client. At one point, there were a couple of angry constituents having nothing to do with our client all the way across town who sent emails. The discussion turned into, “Uh-oh, what are we doing about this?”
So my first question for you, Mike, would be: in the current age—where things happen instantaneously—what represents a public relations crisis?
Mike Swenson:
The crises have not changed as much as the speed at which they happen. There are certainly new elements given technology, but fundamentally they’re similar.
For nonprofits, some of the most obvious crises could involve financial issues. It could be embezzlement, which has happened. It could be misdeeds by executives, which happen in companies as well as nonprofits. It could involve the services a nonprofit is offering—something goes wrong, someone gets hurt, or there’s an issue with delivery.
And one area that everybody sometimes forgets, regardless of your business, is that third parties can cause you to have crises. Something you had no control over can affect you. In the case of a nonprofit, it could be a corporate partner that provides a lot of support. If that corporate partner gets into a crisis, it reflects on you as a recipient of their partnership.
You also have volunteers—people connected to your organization but not necessarily beholden to it. A volunteer could create an issue that reflects poorly on the nonprofit even though the organization had nothing to do with it.
There are many things that can go wrong, at all levels. The word “crisis” implies something big, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be something small that seems innocuous at the time but, if mishandled or ignored, can grow.
Lee Wochner:
Recently, America’s most produced playwright turned out to have their name in the Epstein files. No one is saying this person went to Epstein Island, but immediately some theaters with upcoming productions canceled them.
If you were advising one of these theaters, how might you handle this? This playwright you’re producing is now in this hideous trove of documents. What is the proper course of action?
Mike Swenson:
The issue with the Epstein files reflects a broader reality: people’s names can get drawn into the public sphere even if they’ve done nothing wrong beyond being listed somewhere at the wrong time.
Theaters have the right to cancel productions, but that’s a big jump. We live in a world where everything moves quickly, and in times of crisis we sometimes make decisions faster than we should without gathering enough information.
If I were advising a theater, I might suggest pausing the production rather than canceling outright. Announce a temporary pause while you gather more information. That’s a middle-ground move. It signals concern without making a final decision before all the facts are known. Then, after a week or so, make a final determination based on what you’ve learned.
Lee Wochner:
Well said. I worry that we react too quickly. You’re making a case for being thoughtful. I’d also add something we’ll talk about later—advanced planning is incredibly helpful so you’re not acting on the spur of the moment.
I also worry about guilt by association. We want people involved in wrongdoing to pay the price, but sometimes names just appear. A funny example: Woody Allen once sent someone the wrong link, and it went to the obituary of Marie Severin, a comic book artist from the 1960s and 70s. So now Marie Severin’s name appears in the Epstein files, and she did nothing but draw comic books.
I want to talk about change for another minute. You were press secretary to Governor John Carlin of Kansas before going into public relations. When you’re in that seat, there’s a spotlight on you.
Looking back at that time versus today, when it feels like you can’t win in the public spotlight, what has changed in the past 20 years? And if you find yourself in that spotlight in an unhappy way, what’s the best thing to do?
Mike Swenson:
Before becoming press secretary, I was in the media as a broadcast journalist in radio and television. That’s how I got hired in the 1980s, when TV was dominant. Today, it would be more about social media.
I call those 11 years my graduate school—six years as a reporter and five as press secretary. I learned so much because I was both in the media and working with the media. I didn’t set out to do public relations; I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. But I learned a great deal about how communication works.
Many of the rules haven’t changed. If you find yourself in the spotlight, you have to remain calm. You have to be thoughtful. Take time to decide what you’re going to say and say the right things. Don’t go off half-cocked—that’s when people get in trouble and then blame the media for misquoting them. Often, they weren’t misquoted; they just didn’t think before speaking.
Working for a governor in the 1980s was different. We had four television networks, cable was just starting, and print media was huge. Newspapers and wire services were central. We had 30 individuals representing 14 or 15 media outlets from around the state sitting in the Capitol every day.
You have to be prepared to deal with everything coming your way. Preparation is key, but even in the moment, being thoughtful and deliberate matters. And perhaps most important: what action are you trying to achieve? It’s not just about saying something. What reaction do you want from the media? From the public? Are you trying to change or reverse a negative narrative?
The key is to get back on offense as quickly as possible.
Lee Wochner:
Well said. We work with nonprofits and public agencies. Some of the crises we’ve seen include neighbors taking action against a nonprofit over neighborhood concerns, key personnel posting something unfortunate, leadership caught up in embarrassing situations, sometimes even criminal investigations.
Is there a difference in the types of crises nonprofits or public agencies face compared to small businesses or Fortune 500 companies? And are they handled similarly or differently?
Mike Swenson:
There’s more similarity than difference. The main difference is that nonprofits are working to improve the community through their services. Because of that, nonprofits often begin with a savings account of goodwill than a company has to start with because a company needs to, you know, the company’s in the business to sell things and services and make a profit. And they’re obviously trying to do things in the community to earn the trust and respect of the community. So with the nonprofit, you do start with, well, these guys are doing great. you know, we love what they’re doing and I’m a supporter. I make donations, I volunteer, or I’ve heard of them or my neighbor does stuff with them. And so you’re already starting. Which is an advantage in time of crisis. do have, assuming that, you as a nonprofit, you’ve acted, you’ve walked the walk, talked the talk and acted properly along the way. So that, always thought that was an interesting advantage in a crisis is you do have some extra goodwill. So that’s important. So that may be one of the biggest differences. In terms of how it’s handled, I think, you know, again, now one of the disadvantages of a nonprofit versus a business is you may not have the level of staff support that you need in a time of crisis. may have, you may, you know, it depends how big the nonprofit is. I mean, we worked with some local nonprofits in Kansas city where we were based, are based. And, um, you know, we would sometimes be their PR. They didn’t, they wouldn’t have a person on staff. So we, you know, we’d be hired by, you know, work with their development director or whatever and, or some of the larger ones would have their own person. So, so that’s going to be a, you know, obviously a disadvantage is that you’re going to have fewer people. when you get into a crisis, you’re going to, it’s going to stress the organization a little more than maybe a company that has some resources to say, okay, we need to pull these three people off to handle the crisis. So you three need to go in and keep their, you know, do their job, they day jobs and make sure we keep the company going. Non-profit may not have.
Maybe look around and go, I don’t have anybody else to pull in. So you got to do your day job and you got to help manage this crisis and you got to do this. So that would be a disadvantage. So I think that, but that’s where the goodwill can come in and helpful. And then it comes back to communication, good, frequent, honest communication throughout the crisis and to continue to build up goodwill because the fact of the matter is you can come out of a crisis stronger than you went in if you manage your rights.
Lee Wochner:
Well, and also what you’re saying is play from your strengths. If you’ve got community goodwill, communicate that. Reach out to them, build support—that’s an advantage you have. I think that was well noted.
Mike Swenson:
That’s a great point, Lee. As a nonprofit, you have corporate partners in the community, and in a time of crisis, that’s when you rely on them. They can serve as third parties who say, “They’ve got a problem going on, but we’re a strong partner. We believe in them.” That kind of support out in the community helps carry you through.
Don’t be afraid to seek help from those who are with you day in and day out—corporate partners, volunteers, and especially your board. Your board is critical in a crisis. These are likely strong members of the community. Beyond their day jobs, they now have to help work through this crisis situation. You’ll need your board.
Lee Wochner:
This reminds me of an episode some years ago when we were working with a nonprofit school—a really good school with a great program for kids. They were in a dispute with a landlord who had a different view of what he wanted to do with the property, which was protected land.
We helped them get their message out in the community and activated the board and parents. We created such strong public support that the relevant Los Angeles City Council member stepped in and told the landlord, “You’ve got to stop. You’ve got to work a deal. This is unfair to these kids.”
You’re absolutely right. You do an asset check of what your advantages are and play from your strengths. I can see why you’ve been so good at this.
Mike Swenson:
Thank you. To put a bow on that discussion: if you look only at your staff, you may seem lean. But look at all the support you have. Your board, your volunteers—you have a wider network than you think. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Lee Wochner:
I like where this is going. In a little bit, we’re going to talk about a solution you have that people might turn to. But first, let’s cover what actions you should take if you wake up and see that you or your nonprofit or public agency are the subject of a story you don’t like.
When a crisis hits your organization, what’s the first thing you should do?
Mike Swenson:
If you’re prepared, you’ll have five steps in place. The first thing you’ll do is activate your crisis team. That assumes you’ve already identified who those people are.
If you’re not prepared and the phone rings at 3 a.m. and something has happened, then the first thing you need to do is build that team. You can’t manage this alone. Just as you’ve hired people for development, marketing, or production, you need the right group to help work through this.
Call your strongest executives and say, “We’ve got a problem. Let’s get on Zoom now, and we need to be in the office by six.” You need cool heads in the midst of a crisis. That’s the first step.
Lee Wochner:
Planning in advance is better because you’re prepared. If you’re reactive, you’re not coming from a place of strength. It’s better to be proactive and have a plan.
Mike Swenson:
Exactly. If you don’t have a plan, your first step is tracking down three or four people. That could take hours. If it’s 4 a.m., you might lose two hours just organizing the team.
By 6 a.m., you’re finally in a room asking, “What happened? Why did it happen? What do we need to do right now?” You’re starting from scratch—step one, step two, step three—assigning responsibilities.
Thirty years ago, we had news cycles—morning and evening papers. You had time. Today, there’s no news cycle. It’s constant. You can’t afford to be unprepared.
Lee Wochner:
I started my career as a print journalist, so this discussion excites and saddens me. Looking at what’s happened to newspapers, it’s troubling.
Mike Swenson:
It is. I was at the State Capitol yesterday. The Associated Press Bureau Chief in Topeka now handles five states, including Texas—and he’s by himself.
In the 1980s, there were three full-time AP staffers in Kansas, and two more during the legislative session. That’s the state of the media today.
In a crisis, the media needs to be your friend because you need them. But they’re stretched thin. It can be hard to get your message out quickly. Thankfully, we also have social media and other tools now. But what’s happened to print media is tragic.
Lee Wochner:
I wrote for seven Gannett newspapers at one time and made my living. I don’t know that that’s possible anymore.
To turn a brighter page—do you have examples of organizations that bounced back from a crisis and came out ahead?
Mike Swenson:
One of the most famous examples is Tylenol in the 1990s. There was product tampering. People became ill, and some died.
Within days, the makers of Tylenol told every store in America to pull the product from shelves. You’d walk into a store and see an empty space where Tylenol used to be.
Think about that business decision. It was huge. But it flipped the narrative. They moved from potentially being the cause of a problem to being the victim of one. They said, “Until we find out what’s happening, we’re pulling our product so America can feel safe.”
Within weeks, the mystery was solved and the product returned. That example shows you may have to make a financially painful decision for long-term gain. Sometimes you have to demonstrate your seriousness through action—not just words.
Lee Wochner:
And they innovated. They introduced the foil safety seal under the cap so tampering would be visible. That change put them ahead of where they had been.
Let me ask one last question before a short break. What separates good communication from great communication?
Mike Swenson:
Great question. I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about it.
First, authenticity. People have to believe what you’re saying is honest and true.
Second, succinctness. It’s not listing 44 features or 44 services. It’s saying, “Here’s what we do,” in clear umbrellas that people can grasp.
Third, consistency. If you say something once, it might get heard. Twice, maybe. Three times, you have a chance. You may need to say it four or five times.
Politicians are trained to repeat the key message. In communications, it’s say the same thing, say the same thing, say the same thing. People don’t hear it the first time.
So: authenticity, succinctness, and repetition.
Lee Wochner:
Excellent. We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, Mike and I will dig into how you should respond to a crisis—what to do and what never to do. Stick around.
Jaclyn Uloth:
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Lee Wochner:
We’re back with Mike Swenson of Crisis Track. During the break, you were saying how much you’ve enjoyed working with nonprofits. Why is that?
Mike Swenson:
We got involved early in cause marketing—partnering companies and nonprofits to do good. We worked with Lee Jeans and the Coma Foundation to create National Denim Day. We worked with Sonic to support public school teachers. The March of Dimes was a national client.
We loved our corporate clients too, but working with nonprofits made you feel good. I did this for 32 years, and it became increasingly important to people we hired that they could do meaningful work.
It was one of the attractions of Barclay PR. If you joined us, there was a good chance you’d be part of a nonprofit team. You could help companies grow and make a profit, but you could also help nonprofits get their message out.
And that felt good.
Lee Wochner:
So you’ve developed a program called Crisis Track, which I checked out. It seems to help you prepare for some of the unattractive scenarios we’ve discussed. I want to learn more about this. What is Crisis Track?
Mike Swenson:
Let me tell you the genesis of it, because it was really interesting. In the early 90s, we were hired by a fast food client that was in about 15 states at the time. Now they’re national. They had a big growth plan and were changing agencies. The PR firm I ran was a sister to an ad agency, so we were a combined advertising and PR firm, but we also got business on our own. It was a great setup.
Because this client was on a fast growth track, the head of PR talked to me early on and said she was worried. They were growing fast, had aggressive plans, and she wasn’t sure they were ready if something went wrong. That was very astute of her. In fast food, you have a lot of teenagers working in restaurants, and it can take one person doing something silly to blow up into a national problem.
So her team and our team got in a room for a couple of days in Kansas City and hammered out a plan. That became Crisis Track.
Afterward, I was driving her to the airport and said, “I love what we just did. I know you do too. Can we package this up and offer it to other clients?” She said, “Of course.” So we did.
It’s five steps. The first step is the one I alluded to earlier: who is the team going to be?
In your organization, you need to look at your staff. If you’re a small nonprofit with five people, it’s going to be five people on your crisis team. If you’re larger and you’ve got 20 people, identify key people representing the major functions and pull one person from each function to be on the crisis team.
What you’re telling these people is: “We hired you to do this job, but we are also tasking you with being part of our crisis team. When something bad happens, you’re going to help solve it.”
We also create a secondary team, if you can, to fill in for those people. During a crisis, you want operations to keep going as smoothly as possible. You don’t want everything to screech to a halt. I understand in nonprofits that can be hard because staffing is lean by nature.
That’s step one.
Step two is a working session with the crisis team and the head of the organization. The head of the organization is part of the exercise, but they are not the head of the crisis team. They appoint someone to run it, just like they appoint someone to run development or operations.
This session takes about six hours. That’s all we ask—give us six hours and we’ll bring lunch. At the end of it, you’ll have a crisis plan in place.
For homework, everyone comes to the meeting with a list of everything they think can go wrong. What are all the risks this organization could face?
Then we get in the room and build the list together. I always did it old-school with giant Post-it notes. I want the room ringed with everything that could go wrong. There’s overlap, but each person has things others haven’t thought of. The list grows and grows.
That’s when everyone realizes why we’re doing this. Any one of these things could bring the organization to a halt if it’s not managed correctly. And you don’t always have everyone’s attention at the beginning—some people are there because they were told to be. That’s why you want the head of the organization in the room. They need to say, “This is important,” and participate alongside everyone else.
Now we have our list of risks.
Step three: we look at a recent situation—big or small, any hiccup in operations—and analyze how it was managed. What was the first thing you did? The second? We map out what actually happened.
Then we set that aside and create a map of how we want to handle future situations. We always find gaps—overlap, something that should have happened faster, something missed. We learn from it.
Then we map the first steps—say the first seven steps. Every crisis is different, but there are common early moves that apply to most crises. Think of it like a football team having the first plays planned out.
Step four: we go back to the risks on the wall and create three to five key messages for each risk.
We don’t do all of that in the six-hour meeting, because that’s work we typically do for the client, but I always go through three or four examples with the team so even people not involved in communications understand there’s both art and science to messaging. There’s a reason we say certain things during certain types of crises.
Then we build out messaging for every risk.
Step five is simple: who is the spokesperson?
The head of the organization needs to be ready to speak at key points in the crisis, but you also need someone focused day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute on messaging and communication. That might be someone in communications or someone else, depending on the organization.
So it’s: who’s your team, what can go wrong, what are the first steps we take, what are we going to say, and who is going to say it?
The initial messaging is critical because of the speed of today’s world. People can grab news instantly. You need something ready to say as soon as possible. Instead of gathering in a room and spending an hour arguing, you pull your prebuilt key messages, turn them into a paragraph, get them on your website, post them on social, send a press release, and get the first message out quickly: “Yes, something is happening. Here’s what we’re doing to fix it. We’ll keep you informed.”
Lee Wochner:
I love everything you just said, and I’ll tell you why. I can relate to it because the process you described is similar to our process of establishing a marketing initiative with clients. We love jumbo Post-it notes. We love getting it all on the wall so people can see it and share it. There’s overlap, but there’s also a lot of freshness.
What I really like is this: you have three to five messages for each potential problem, and you’ve already decided on them. You’ve already thought about what you would do. It’s proactive rather than reactive, and it plays to your strengths and capabilities—not fear, rash behavior, weakness, or upset.
Mike Swenson:
Exactly. Get on offense quickly in a crisis. It’s easy to get pushed back on your heels. It’s easy to get knocked over and run over. You have to stand up and say, “We know something is going on. We understand there’s a problem. We get it.” And at the beginning of a crisis, that’s when you need the head of the organization to stand up and say, “We get it, and it’s on me to make sure we get this fixed.”
Lee Wochner:
What you just defined is Crisis Track. That is the Crisis Track program.
Mike Swenson:
That’s it.
Lee Wochner:
What differentiates that from other crisis management programs?
Mike Swenson:
At the very beginning, our client and I agreed: let’s do something simple. We’d both seen companies with three or four giant notebooks labeled “Crisis: Book One, Book Two, Book Three, Book Four.” Somebody worked hard to make those, but you don’t have time to read four notebooks when the inevitable happens, and you can’t retain it anyway.
With Crisis Track, when the head of the organization gets the 3 a.m. phone call, it’s different. Now you know who your team is. The head of the crisis team calls and says, “We’ve already been meeting. We’ve already put the first three steps in place. We have the message ready to go. We want you to approve it before we send it.” You approve it, and you’re on offense.
Instead of being three hours behind, you’re already up and running.
Lee Wochner:
From a nonprofit or public agency perspective, who is Crisis Track right for?
Mike Swenson:
It’s right for everyone. But it’s especially valuable for smaller organizations because of bandwidth.
If you’re a small nonprofit doing great work with six staff members, you likely can’t afford to hire a PR firm to help you through a crisis. You might have a small marketing budget, but that’s going toward fundraising and communications, which are critical.
Crisis Track is something you can do on your own. Put the team together, get in a room, identify what could go wrong, map the steps you’ll take, create messaging, and assign the spokesperson.
That’s what’s on crisistrack.com—videos I produced that walk people through how to create their own Crisis Track process. The process is simple and works regardless of size. For smaller organizations, it levels the playing field. You can go to bed knowing that if something bad happens, you’re ready. The first five minutes are already handled, and it saves time.
Lee Wochner:
The simplicity is attractive. No one is going to read four or five notebooks, and no one can retain that information. That’s why we write action plans that are concise and easy to use. The news cycle changes every few minutes.
This has been really interesting. We’re going to put a link to Crisis Track in the show notes. Mike, do you have any further advice for listeners?
Mike Swenson:
Crisis planning and helping clients through crises was the most important PR work we did. Everything else—positive PR, marketing plans, growth strategies—can go right out the door if a crisis hits and you manage it poorly.
We’ve been involved in major crises where we had people on site for a week helping a client through it. It’s hard work and tensions run high.
One role we played was being the calm voice in the room. People need to vent. There can be finger-pointing behind the scenes. You need someone to keep things steady so everyone stays focused on what needs to be done.
If you don’t have an outside PR partner, that calm voice might be the head of your board or a key volunteer—someone who can be an extra set of ears and an extra mind, and only speak when needed. A plan helps reduce tension because you know what you’re doing and what the next steps are.
Even with planning, you still need someone who can say, “Let’s take a break. Get coffee. Take a walk around the block. We’ll regroup in ten minutes and decide what to do next.”
Lee Wochner:
Good advice. Mike, if people want to reach out to you, what’s the best way?
Mike Swenson:
My LinkedIn profile is the best way. There’s a lot of crisis content on there, and when this podcast is released it’ll be up there too. And crisistrack.com is where the videos are available for purchase to help you walk through the process on your own.
If someone invests in the videos and runs into an issue, they can DM me on LinkedIn and say, “We bought your product, but we’re having trouble with something.” We’ll get on Zoom and help work through it.
When a company hired us to do Crisis Track, we became part of their crisis team—someone from our team sat on theirs.
One more thing: we asked the crisis team to meet once a quarter. That meeting is for two things. First, if you had any crises or hiccups in the last three months, review how you handled them. Did you do everything okay? Do you need to tweak the process or the messaging?
Second: are there new risks on the horizon? New potential crises?
When the team meets quarterly, crisis planning becomes part of ongoing operations—not a side add-on. It belongs alongside development, marketing, operations, legal, and HR. This team meets four times a year to keep everything up to date.
Lee Wochner:
Great advice. Mike, it’s been a real pleasure having you. Thanks for joining us.
Mike Swenson:
Thanks, Lee. Appreciate it.
Jaclyn Uloth:
Thanks for listening. How to Market Your Nonprofit is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit counterintuity.com to learn more.