When a crisis hits, a community is operating in its worst moment. This is so important to acknowledge in organizational leadership. Over the past few years in our school community, we have experienced a variety of challenging situations, each one putting us on the verge of panic and operating at elevated stress levels throughout the organization.

It is important for leaders to acknowledge that when emotions are high, thinking can be unclear, and we can tend to be reactive rather than disciplined in our messaging. Leadership’s primary role during a crisis needs to be reassuring the community that “we are ok”, that this situation is hard, this is tough, this is sad, this is scary AND we are ok.
Here are a few practical steps our team at Proctor has utilized to help our community through crisis:
1) Invest in Building Trust Capital - When organizations do the long-tail work of crafting trust with constituents through consistent, frequent, mission-centric messaging, they are investing in organizational trust capital. This can be through website or social media content, parent news letters, alumni communications, blogs, etc but the more you can communicate your mission in action with your constituents, the more you can build essential trust capital that you can then tap into when a crisis hits. Each piece of content builds trust in your organization, and over time, this saving’s account of trust is critical.
2) Center your crisis messaging in a position of care for the community. Managing the crisis at hand must be the primary focus when crafting specifics of a message, but having a lens of community care is critical to maintaining the trust, especially when your organization is likely utilizing outside communication resources and legal support in a crisis. Having this lens of community care allows you to push back, appropriately, on legal counsel or crisis communication specialists to make sure that you are not only protecting yourself and your brand, but expressing your humanity as an organization.
3) Do the logistical work ahead of time. This piece of advice may feel super practical and boring, but in a crisis moment, having the logistics of your communications systems in order allows you to not spend precious bandwidth worrying if your email lists are up to date, if your constituent groups are accurate, if you have a crisis communication firm at the ready, etc. If you can make sure you have all of these logistics dialed in prior to a crisis hitting, you are able to focus on activating the plan, not building the plan. This simple step will allow your organizational leadership to focus on the second point around community care and specific messaging that could easily be pushed aside in order to take care of these logistical details.
No crisis is easy to manage - emotionally or tactically - but these steps, among others, will help ensure your organization is ready to navigate the nuances of the specific situation with a clear head and a focus on ensuring your community, not just your brand, is cared for throughout the entirety of the situation.
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