How to Create a Nonprofit Crisis Communication Plan

If you’ve ever had that “what do we do now” moment at your organization, you probably understand the importance of a crisis communication plan for nonprofits.

It doesn’t have to be a significant emergency for crisis communications to be necessary. This strategic plan helps you manage and communicate effectively during challenging and unexpected situations, some potentially more damaging than others. This specialized form of communication aims to mitigate the impact of the crisis on your organization’s stakeholders, including donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, and the general public.

While the hope is that you never have to implement a crisis communication plan, it is vital to have one in place to have a plan of action should the unexpected happen. This can help your team maintain calm and act efficiently, helping your organization maintain trust and credibility during a crisis.

Understanding the Nature of Crises for Nonprofits

Nonprofits are not immune from controversy – some crises that could arise include accusations of financial mismanagement, misconduct allegations, cyber-attacks, sudden leadership changes, and more.

While the events that might lead to a crisis might not be that different for nonprofits, there are some unique challenges and considerations to consider. Nonprofit organizations often operate with limited resources and depend heavily on public trust. Addressing these unique challenges requires your organization to recognize the multi-faced nature of nonprofit work, where factors like reputation and community relationships are interconnected.

Leveraging Your Community During a Crisis

One of your biggest assets in a crisis can be the community support your nonprofit has built over time. Key stakeholders and the community you work with and serve are often part of your crisis plan because they can speak to your organization’s history, viability, and credibility.

Regardless of the crisis, your organization’s community can play a vital role in recovery. This starts with clear and transparent communication from your organization about what happened and what role they can play to help.

Make sure to highlight the nonprofit’s positive impact on the community in the past and how its work continues to make a difference, even during the crisis. Encourage two-way communication by actively engaging with community members, volunteers, donors, and beneficiaries. Listen to their concerns, gather feedback, and involve them in discussions about solutions and strategies.

How a Crisis Can Impact Your Organization in the Long-Term

The impact a crisis can have on your organization is primarily influenced by the effectiveness of your response.

A well-managed crisis can bolster your organization’s resilience and enhance your reputation. You can foster renewed trust in your organization by demonstrating transparency, accountability, and a commitment to learning from the situation. A positive response, such as improved crisis communication, strategic adjustments, and proactive measures, enables your organization to mitigate immediate damage.

On the flip side, a poor response can have lasting adverse effects. Reputation damage, loss of donor trust, and diminished support may result in significant financial losses and hinder your ability to fulfill your mission.

Crisis communications for nonprofits empower your organization to navigate challenges, learn from the experience, and hopefully, emerge stronger.

Overview of Crisis Communication Plans for Nonprofits

This strategic document outlines the procedures, strategies, and protocols for effectively managing communication during a crisis or challenging situation that could impact your reputation, operations, or stakeholder relationships.

A crisis communication plan guides your team through unforeseen events while maintaining transparency, trust, and control over crisis communications and messaging.

Developing Crisis Communication Plans

Strong crisis communication plans include everything you need to help guide your organization through a challenging situation. The communications or marketing and executive team generally creates and maintains the plan.

Here are key components for your crisis communication plans:

• Introduction and Overview: Outline the purpose, scope, and importance of effective crisis communication for the organization.
• Crisis Communication Team and Contact Information: Identify team members with roles, responsibilities, and contact information. This may include spokespersons, key decision-makers, communication coordinators, and relevant stakeholders.
• Crisis Communication Policy and Objectives: Explain your organization’s commitment to transparency, timely communication, and maintaining stakeholder trust during a crisis.
• Risk Assessment and Potential Crisis Scenarios: Identify potential crisis scenarios you might face, including natural disasters, financial crises, legal issues, or reputational threats.
• Key Messaging and Communication: Write and approve critical messages that align with your values, mission, and objectives before any potential crisis event.
• Communication Protocols and Procedures: Write procedures for communication management during a crisis, including the approval processes, information verification, message dissemination, and escalation protocols.
• Media Relations Strategy: Define how your organization will interact with media during a crisis. Designate a spokesperson, conduct media training, and set guidelines for responding to media inquiries or interviews.
• Stakeholder Communication Plan: Identify key stakeholders such as employees, customers, partners, regulators, and the general public and develop communication strategies to address their concerns and provide information.
• Communication Channels and Tools: Specify communication channels to disseminate information during a crisis. This may include social media platforms, websites, press releases, email, hotlines, or other relevant mediums.
• Monitoring and Response Plan: Establish a real-time system for monitoring the crisis.
• Training, Testing, and Review: Plan to train personnel involved in your crisis communication plans by conducting drills or simulations and setting post-crisis evaluation protocols to assess the plan’s effectiveness and identify improvement areas.

Implementing Your Crisis Communication Plan

Once you are in a crisis, it is too late to think about how to implement the plan you’ve created. Implementation of a crisis communication plan should be part of your strategy.

Some of the most significant considerations are timing and tone, how quickly you respond, and how to communicate with stakeholders. Crisis communication often includes a mix of direct messaging to key individuals or audiences with more broad or general information for the greater public.

Here are six steps to implementing your crisis communications plan:

1. Ensure all team members are familiar with the plan. Conduct training sessions or workshops to review the plan annually.
2. Set up communication protocols and procedures outlined in the plan. This includes creating channels for internal communication among team members and external communication with stakeholders, media, and the public.
3. Develop pre-approved messaging templates for various communication channels, such as press releases, social media posts, website updates, and internal memos.
4. Implement tools and systems to monitor potential crises. Monitor social media and news outlets to ensure you understand how the public feels about the issue.
5. When a crisis occurs, activate response protocols outlined in the plan. Gather relevant information, assess the situation, and convene the crisis communication team to determine appropriate responses.
6. Engage with stakeholders early to ensure that they understand the situation and can help facilitate your crisis communication plan.

You’ll need to continuously assess the plan’s effectiveness during and after the crisis. We’ll dive into this more in the next section, but conducting a post-crisis debriefing session with the team to analyze your response, evaluate communication strategies, and adjust for future crisis management is integral to implementing your plan.

Evaluating and Updating Your Crisis Communication Plan

Each time you deploy your crisis communication plans, reflect on what did and did not work after the situation has passed. Crisis communication plans are living documents and will evolve as you learn from past experiences.

Even if you don’t have to manage a crisis or implement the plan, you should review the draft annually and update relevant information. It is essential to pay special attention to team members and roles that can change over time. You don’t want vital elements of your plan assigned to people who are no longer around or roles that don’t exist.

Guidelines for evaluating your nonprofit crisis communication plan include:

• Establish Evaluation Criteria: Consider elements such as plan responsiveness, accuracy of information, consistency in messaging, stakeholder engagement, timeliness of communication, and overall effectiveness in managing the crisis.
• Gather Feedback: Ask the team involved in executing the plan what worked well and where improvements could be made.
• Assess Communication Effectiveness: Evaluate how well key messages were conveyed across various communication channels. Did the messaging come across as intended?
• Review Response Time: Evaluate how quickly you were able to respond and disseminate information.
• Monitor Media Coverage and Public Perception: Review media coverage related to the crisis and assess how the organization was portrayed. Monitor public sentiment, social media discussions, and feedback from stakeholders to gauge their perceptions of your response.
• Identify Lessons Learned: Analyze strengths, weaknesses, and challenges encountered during the execution of the plan.
• Conduct a Post-Crisis Debriefing: Discuss outcomes, gather insights, and solicit suggestions for improving the plan based on the experience gained during the crisis.
• Update and Refine the Plan: Based on all the information you gather, make changes to the plan to help you better respond to future emergencies.

Proactive Crisis Communications for Nonprofits

Creating crisis communication plans for your nonprofit is a proactive solution for the inevitable. While no one wants to imagine dealing with a crisis, an unexpected situation can cripple your organization if mismanaged. Your plan will help your organization better manage and mitigate these unfortunate events.

We hope that you never encounter the unexpected, but we want you to be ready if you do. If you want a template to help start your own nonprofit’s crisis communication plan, try this toolkit from the Colorado Nonprofit Association.