Digital Activism: Do’s and Don’ts to Keep Yourself Safe Online
As the student movement to end the genocide in Gaza has shown, protestors in the U.S. and worldwide face increasing obstacles. Social media and the internet are powerful tools for organizing, with platforms like Instagram and TikTok becoming instrumental in bolstering social movements. However, the threat of online harassment, surveillance, and doxing is ever-present, and…
Read MoreWhat’s Your Media Engagement Plan for a Crisis?
Now that you have prepared your spokespeople and your internal organization to respond in a crisis, it’s time to look outwards. What’s your plan to engage the media when news breaks? Do you have up-to-date press lists of breaking news desks/reporters? Every news outlet has someone assigned to “breaking news.” These may be editors who…
Read MoreFive Things Your Organization Can Do In Advance to Prepare for a Crisis
As part of our series on preparing for rapid response, here’s a checklist of five things your organization can do internally to be ready when important news breaks. Do you have a “triage” plan for managing and prioritizing inbound press calls as well as for managing outbound media engagement priorities? Not all reporters or outlets…
Read MoreHow to Prepare Your Spokespeople for Rapid Response Events
Note: This post is part of a series about how to prepare your organization for its next crisis opportunity. Do you have multiple, well-trained, media spokespeople? A few common challenges that organizations face revolve around spokespeople. If there are too few, or the role is concentrated in a single leadership figure, this will result in…
Read MoreIs Your Organization Ready for Rapid Response Opportunities?
There are two types of media engagement: those where you execute a proactive plan and those where you spring into action in response to breaking news stories. Both—the known and the unknown—done correctly, require a sustained infrastructure, a substantial amount of coordination, and ever-deepening partnerships and trust-building with and among the communities and allies we…
Read MoreDon’t Get Caught Creating Content When Breaking News Hits
Breaking news opportunities spotlight which advocacy organizations are prepared and which are not. While it’s impossible to prepare for every scenario, all communications shops should have evergreen digital content at the ready for crisis response. You can always update content or share text to better suit the breaking news situation, if needed, but you don’t…
Read MoreExecuting a Crisis Communications Plan: A Case Study About the Pulse Nightclub Shooting
Our previous blog post, “Prep for a Crisis Before It Hits: A Guide to Creating an Organizational Crisis Communications Plan,” established that having a crisis communications plan in place before a crisis happens can save a lot of headache and make for better and quicker solutions. The New America Foundation recently released a report that…
Read MorePrep for a Crisis Before It Hits: A Guide to Creating an Organizational Crisis Communications Plan
Let’s face it: 2016 was a train wreck. A particularly volatile and unpredictable election year was coupled with a barrage of violent domestic and international events that had multiple advocacy groups scrambling to respond in a crisis. To many, 2016 felt like a year of working from one crisis to the next, without respite. Crises…
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