Sooner or later, every nonprofit advocacy team is forced into a rapid response situation. Perhaps there is an urgent news story related to your mission, or a politician makes a statement related to your work. Something will happen that requires you to get a statement or some facts out fast—and that can be a real drill.
The key to making rapid response situations more manageable and less stressful is preparation. While you cannot envision every scenario that might happen, you can have some basic materials and processes in place that make rapid response much easier.
Take these steps to ensure that you are as ready as you can be when it is time to move fast.
- Create Messaging in Advance. Many organizations have a messaging document—created before there’s a crisis—that provides language and quotes to discuss their organization and their issues. This can be extremely helpful when pulling together a response on deadline. Just make sure the document is reviewed and updated regularly.
- Create Fact Sheets. Similarly, fact sheets for your organization and each of its issues, along with sourcing, can be developed in advance, so that they are ready to be pressed into use. These should also be updated regularly; every quarter is a good cadence.
- Get Approvals Done Now. Both messaging and fact sheets can be reviewed, revised and approved by your organization’s leadership long before there’s a need for rapid response. This provides a trove of pre-approved material to pull from when time is short.
- Streamline the Approvals. Your normal approval process for content may slow things down in a rapid response situation. A better strategy is to have a discussion within your organization and establish a streamlined approval process in advance. Cutting the approvals down to one or two people will allow you to move faster.
- Make Sure the Technology Works. Organizations that engage the supporters on their advocacy list regularly have an advantage: they know their technology works. Organizations that engage in advocacy only a few times a year (or only when there’s a crisis) should make sure that templates are updated and systems work as they should. Send test emails before your deploy your urgent message.
- Keep Social Channels Active. Often, the fastest way to get something out is via social media. If your organization’s channels are active, you post regularly and the login information is readily available, this will be far easier when you have a deadline. Make sure to tag your responses appropriately so they gain visibility.
Remember that the key to rapid response is speed, and so it often pays to keep your first effort short. It is often better to publish a few paragraphs and a quote from your CEO and do it fast than it is to take the time to produce a fully polished letter or post. You can always release more material later, after your initial response is released. A brief message is better than no message at all.
