As part of the PRSA International Conference, the Association Nonprofit Section held a symposium Oct. 29 with three sessions featuring firsthand insights from the COVID-19 pandemic. The presentations reinforce the common challenges and opportunities of being a nonprofit communicator or a PR practitioner who supports an association.
Data-driven Story-telling
During “Fresh Solutions to Fighting Hunger: Navigating Food Assistance During a Pandemic,” Zuani Villareal of Feeding America and Cathy Nestlen, APR, from the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, discussed how their organizations responded to the pandemic and the economic crisis that followed.
“This pandemic brought to light how food insecurity and hunger affects millions of people. It is our job to continue to keep that conversation going and continue to build momentum so that we can provide food to the millions of families that need our help,” Villareal said.
Tell a Cohesive Story
Prior to the pandemic, Feeding America estimated that 35 million Americans were food insecure. Today, that number has increased to 50 million.
The two discussed how their organizations worked together during what they called a “perfect storm” of operational disruption and increased demand affecting all 200 food banks within the Feeding America network to tell a cohesive story related to food insecurity.
“Feeding America provided resources, detailed data and current research that allowed us to stay focused on our local mission and our response,” Nestlen said. “We were able to strengthen existing relationships with our local media and work with national media to represent our community and our fellow food banks.”
Focus on the Mission
Client stories and distribution and donation events put a face to the numbers and expanded the story-telling opportunities, while relationships with celebrities, athletes, influencers and corporations helped with donations and awareness.
“We committed to having a team member on-site at a distribution or other event at least weekly, not just to take photos or manage media, but also to remain connected to the mission as much as possible. Nothing can replace seeing your mission in action first-hand,” Nestlen said.
Audience fatigue is a significant concern for nonprofits. Nestlen and Villareal described how their organizations became increasingly agile to respond to emerging trends and finding new ways to share their story.
To keep the media’s attention as the crisis continues, they’re using a variety of sources, from national leaders to volunteers and clients. They also have created multimedia assets to use on their own channels and provide to media outlets.
“Data helped us provide accountability and increase visibility,” Villareal said. “This is what we know. These are the latest survey results. Here is new data, such as the number of meals, number of tons of food distributed, dollars granted to local food banks. As a result, our response has strengthened our reputation as a transparent and trustworthy organization.”
Relevance and Relationships
Those lessons were reinforced during “Strengthening Relevance During Uncertain Times,” featuring Greg Donaldson, senior vice president, Corporate and Marketing Communications for the American Heart Association.
A Duty to Inform
Known around the world as a trusted source of information related to heart disease and stroke, the Association recognized its duty to offer science-based context and insights to its audiences and journalists and help inform the COVID narrative.
“We quickly realized that to stay relevant in a chaotic environment and in a constricted and dynamic news environment, we had to focus even more critically on our most important constituencies and to figure out how to make our organization a credible, trusted leading voice in respect to COVID information,” Donaldson said.
The Association PR team began by taking a fresh look at their work and applied a “COVID lens” to existing assets and ongoing initiatives.
“Our objective was to try to keep our brand, our organization and its mission relevant to consumers, through the media,” he said. “We sought to do what we could to provide our audience with the very best and latest scientific knowledge.”
To achieve that, the organization redeployed staff and resources and adopted a newsroom model to guide their efforts. The team monitored the news cycle to identify emerging coverage trends and opportunities to continue to advance the mission.
“Packaging and issuing news releases in real time around emerging trends mattered tactically for our organization,” Donaldson said. “Focusing our pitching relative to those trends and organizational priorities merged together to yield coverage.”
Provide What Your Audience Needs
During the early days of the pandemic, journalists weren’t seeking out heart experts, and the American Heart Association had to pivot to remain relevant.
Initial media outreach took a more general approach focused on the early findings that people with co-morbidities such as heart disease fared worse with COVID and that those in historically excluded communities were being impacted disproportionately. As a result, they pitched stories about the importance of physical activity, mental health and not delaying care. As it became clear that COVID was much more than a respiratory disease, the organization was able to focus resources on telling its story through a COVID lens and offer information that mattered.
“Good characters telling good stories remain key to media coverage,” Donaldson said.
The PR staff recognized that interviews with top tier outlets no longer required travel, professionally shot footage or satellite time. In addition to interviews via Zoom, they began conducting virtual media tours, making experts from the American Heart Association available to local outlets in top markets. Leveraging a network of experts from across the country allowed the organization to easily identify and offer additional compelling elements that proved to be useful to the broadcast media.
Seize the Moment
Throughout his presentation, Donaldson emphasized the importance of relationships to earned media efforts. “Regardless of the size of your budget or the size of your team, nonprofit communicators can cultivate relationships of influence, which can be force multipliers for the stories that you want to tell,” he said. “All communicators need to commit to move quickly, to listen carefully, and understand the nuances of the story. You can use your mission, your stories and your assets to develop a scalable approach to media relations.”
Donaldson encouraged nonprofit communicators to seize the moment and commit to doing their best work. “Overall, it’s easy to take for granted the contributions of public relations to an organization. This was an opportunity to demonstrate our expertise and prove our merit, when other channels were less viable.”
Change Management and Self-Care
The final session of the symposium, “Finding Resiliency for Your Membership and Yourself,” featured communicators from two associations whose members directly care for COVID-19 patients.
Heather Willden, from the American Association for Respiratory Care (AARC), and Melinda-Beckett-Maines, from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), led an inspiring session that went beyond their approach to COVID-19 communication to offering strategies for the uncertain days ahead.
Embrace the Spotlight
When the pandemic hit the U.S., members of their associations were immediately thrust to the front lines of the response and into the spotlight.
“We went from having minimal media interest in the work of respiratory therapists to journalists everywhere wanting to know what they did, how ventilators worked, and what we were seeing in patients with COVID,” Willden said.
Recognize Stages of Change
Everyone is experiencing a huge amount of change this year, and communicators need to recognize how that affects themselves and their audiences.
“Recognizing the stages of change helps inform our response and our messaging,” Beckett-Maines said. “Think through where you are and where your audience is. Not everyone is at the same stage in the process. Our audiences are seeking affirmation and reassurance, and we need to help people embrace change and be equipped to help others move through it.”
She said, “What was will never be again. What is, is not ideal, and what we’re moving toward is where we have our hope. We don’t control what happens to us, but we do have some control about how we respond to it.”
“We’re not going to return to the old normal. We’re going to move forward into something new,” Willden said. “Someday, a sense of normalcy will replace the chaos and uncertainty we’re experiencing this year.”
Be Willing to Innovate
At AACN, the organization established a new organizational structure to align resources and staff with new priorities. Among the new tools was a staffing matrix to easily identify staff members who were at capacity, could handle additional workload or needed assistance to manage projects.
Both associations have taken a fresh look at their traditional communication channels. At AARC, they’re moving from static publications to an online newsroom approach, with new content added frequently. AACN paused its printed member magazine and revised its e-newsletter to better fit the need for COVID-19 information. ““It wasn’t realistic to work weeks in advance when information was changing by the day,” Beckett-Maines said.
Nurture Collaboration
The two associations kept the needs of their members at the forefront of their work.
“We wanted to get our members the resources they needed and make it easy to find,” Willden said. “Beyond the clinical information, we sought to nurture a sense of community so members could collaborate, share information and support each other so that they could all help their patients. What will make their life better and what will benefit them?”
Some of the moves that began as a temporary stopgap will continue past the current circumstances.
“We’ve seen the impact of unleashing our staff’s creativity, encouraging innovation, and empowering them to collaborate,” Beckett-Maines said.
Both organizations began exploring new channels to communicate with members, such as podcasts and new styles of videos.
Find Your Resiliency
The duo closed their presentation reflecting back to the definition of resiliency, reminding everyone that we are all experiencing these changes and are facing the need to adapt and thrive.