www.missionbased.com

Date

City

Topic

Contact

1/16/07

Ducks Cay, FL

Social Entrepreneurship

NAPSEC
Sherry Kolbe
napsec@aol.com

1/24/07

Denver

Social Entrepreneurship

Colorado Nonprofit Association
Ruth Zerezghi
rzerezghi@coloradononprofits.org

2/22-23/07

Orlando

Business Development

NISH
Deborah Atkinson
Datkinson@nish.org

2/28/07

San Francisco

Nonprofit Stewardship

Development Training Institute
Kristina Samsom
ksamson@dtinational.org

3/27/07

Las Vegas

Social Entrepreneurship

NCCBH Annual Conference
Gabrielle Bosco
GabrielleB@nccbh.org

Business Recovery and Marketing

First and foremost, after a disaster, you need to let people know your organizational status. Employees will want to know about coming to work, donors and funders will be concerned about operations, vendors will want to know about making deliveries, your board and volunteers will be concerned about their responsibilities and, of course, the people you serve will want to know when and how you will be back doing your mission. Just as with your overall disaster plan, this requires a bit of planning.

First, sit down with your management team and think through who would need to be contacted if there were a major disruption. Make lists of board, staff, key vendors, funders, and others who are critical to you. Plan on contacting these people in five ways: email, phone, snail mail (or on foot if necessary), by the general media, and through your website. Develop a listing of the phone, email and street addresses of the local broadcast media. Add to this contact information for your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and gather as many cell phone numbers as you can for staff (remembering that most people under 26-28 don't have land line phones--so you can't find them in the phone book!)

Now, take that data off site. Put it on a CD, make 10 copies and give them to all your key employees, and perhaps even a board officer. I know one organization that keeps this information in a safe-deposit box at their bank. It doesn't do much good to have all this information on a hard drive that is destroyed by a fire, flood, or tornado.

What you want to have is the capacity to respond to a variety of situations, and to not be Dependant on any one method of communication. During the recovery efforts for Hurricane Katrina, one of the biggest problems rescuers had was that their plan depended on cell phones---and the entire cell grid was down for weeks.

Note: one simple method to cut down on work for any one person is to have a "phone tree", where all staff (and perhaps board) are on the tree. I call two people, they each call two more, etc. This really reduces the time needed to get information out--if email is down, and/or for people who don't have access to email--or whose power may be out.

Finally, remember that post-disaster communications need two components: Whatever you say in print, by email, or that you put on your website need to be facts, not rumors, and they need to be short, and to the point. No one has time to read 12 paragraphs about how upset you are. Save that for later, or for your blog.

People want to know these things (usually in this order):

Are your people OK?
What kind of emergency help does your organization need right now (if any)?
Are you open (and if not, when will you be)?
Who should I contact (and how) if I want to know more?

Remember that in the aftermath of any disaster, one of the central keys is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Planning on how to react now will save time, money, angst, and effort later on.

If you want to see more about this in detail, take a look at more about my book Mission-Based Marketing; Second Edition

January, 2007 -by Peter C. Brinckerhoff