Episode 213: Your Nonprofit is Directly Affected by a Natural Disaster - What Should You Do?
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
Welcome to this edition of Around with Randall. I every once in a while receive an email from a listener or someone that's a colleague and says, can you address this subject? And today is one of those requests. Commentaries, outreaches that came we have going on in Los Angeles, particularly on the western side of the Los Angeles area, a terrific and horrific natural disaster with the fires.
The question was, what does a nonprofit do when they aren't actually the ones serving the particular disaster? And in this case, it's LA. But hurricanes with Halloween or our family through my wife had to live through Katrina. When you're the nonprofit who's actually in the disaster zone, you have been affected. How do you deal with this? How do you find mechanisms and ways to get back up and going?
And I thought it was such an interesting question because Kristen, who was the one who sent it to me, is affiliated with a small nonprofit, and they're trying to figure this out. And so let me start with the basic premise. Here I am gone past. The more important things. Are your employees safe? Have people been displaced? How do you help your internal people? If you're a small nonprofit, maybe think of yourself as a small family. How do you help each other with the basics? I'm assuming we've moved past that. We're going to concentrate today on the nonprofit and what it can do to get itself back up. Part of the success in getting back into the flow of the work you do actually, unfortunately, probably should occur and in many organizations does occur before the actual disaster happens.
Basic things like where would you go off site to gather and meet? If you don't have access to whatever facilities you utilize every day? Things like backing up data, your database, which we're going to talk about in various ways with some tactical things that you can do, is critically important. How do you access that data? So if all you have and you're not web-based, let's say for a CRM, your donor database, if it's in the fire, the hurricane, the natural disaster, whatever, it's hard to access. So how do you back that up? How is that web-based and/or backed up web-based so you can access it from a distance? Where would you gather just to communicate? And I'm not talking about a physical spot. What about online? Do you have backup places where you can utilize whether it's a Teams Zoom call? Everybody's aware of it, or you actually have a text messaging system that you can. There's lots of different ways of doing this. There's no better or worse. It depends on size, scale, and affordability. But if you haven't talked about these things, that should be something for any nonprofit for you to say, look, if we couldn't get here, where would we go? How do we get our data? If this server's offline, how do we get to another server? Does someone have a hard back? All of these questions natural disaster preparedness becomes critically important. This does not even take into account the paper records and other things that go from payroll to basic bank statements. There's so much, and I am certainly not an expert at that, but you should think about what your preparedness is.
Let's say that you've done some level of preparedness, and you've got to figure out how are we going to stand up our organization as quickly and as appropriately as we can? We know that most nonprofits function on a very limited budget, with the 1.8 or $9 million, designations of nonprofits from the IRS.
Most of these are very small. These are the groups of people I really want to talk to today. Maybe you have 500 donors or a thousand donors. And if you're the United Way, you've got a million different offices. That's not the group we're talking about today.
So the first thing is to really sit down and write out what you need. And I think the thing we have to realize is we can't do everything. When emergencies happen, we sometimes have to cordon off or prioritize certain more critical aspects of what we need to deal with in the nonprofit world that we're talking about here. What's the core thing that you do? And number two, what are the things inside that core aspect that are critical to keep moving? I'm going to guess, most likely people. And so things like payroll and how are we going to make sure people are compensated. How are we going to do our outreach for the service we provide at the very basic level? If you try to do too much and you're not specific enough about what you actually need to function at a base level, your messaging will become confusing. You will not raise the money you want for the core things that will keep you functioning, and you won't be able to move forward and rebuild in some way.
So the first thing is if, as an organization, know and write down and strategize about what are the basics. Number two, and then we'll get into the tactics of operations or what you might be able to do to raise some money or awareness.
If you have to do a very quick alignment of your board and whatever staff you might have in emergency situations, a CEO, executive director, president, whatever title you want, it’s going to take more of a lead because of the instantaneous need for decision-making. There may be a great deal of communication with the chair of the board in the immediate moments where things have to be decided. But as you come out of it, making sure your board and your key leadership and your staff are all engaged in this process is critical. That may mean some strange ways of meeting to talk about strategy. You talk about overcoming challenges, organizational why a CEO, president, executive can only has limited capabilities, limited authority. You've got to bring that governance structure together. You may have to do so on a Zoom call because that's all anybody has. Cell phones and wherever you may have to go, meet away from where you used to meeting. You're going to have to find a way in which to bring the leadership together in those first moments. I'm all for kind of a militaristic decision-making process. There’s 1 or 2 people making decisions right now. We got to go. But as you come out of it, there will be other voices. Power structures become important. Getting people together is essential. I remember early on in my career where I was the head of philanthropy for an independent Jesuit school, high school prominent. I had a pretty good staff. We unfortunately had a death on our campus. It turned out it had really nothing to do with us. It happened in the parking lot on a Friday or Saturday night. But there was a core group of people that were called together to figure out what’s our strategy to communicate with the press, who had a lot of questions. Turnout had nothing to do with us. It wasn’t that I had a lot of input because I probably shouldn’t, not and didn’t, but I wasn’t included in those meetings. And I had a lot of donors calling me going, what’s going on? I couldn’t answer those questions. One of the takeaways that we realized was, even though I wouldn’t have a lot to add to that, the head of our—we had an outside marketing person who kind of led the crisis communication. We had a principal who was talking to the families. Most important, the kids who weren’t there weren’t involved, but they never thought about, well, wait a minute. We have these really large donors who take ownership responsibility in their engagement with us. They had the board locked in, but by not having me there, they couldn’t—they didn’t have the communication chain. So getting people together so everybody’s communicating is important. Making sure everyone has messaging correct and strategy that can be enacted. I'm not advocating for a board to take over the staff operations, but what I am saying is there needs to be some alignment.
Okay, so what are the things we can do? So I’m going to lay out 11 different things you can do if you have an emergency situation where you need to figure out how do we raise dollars or build or continue communications regarding what we do and how we do it, even though we might have been in the middle of the disaster zone. The first is creating what might be thought of as awareness. If you live across the street, let’s say, from a particular nonprofit and your house has gone there and the nonprofit’s gone, you probably know that. But most of your donors and constituents don’t live next door. How do you communicate that there is an issue and a challenge? Do you have a list of email addresses? Do you have a—is there a place where you could go get your top 25 donors' phone numbers and call them? How do you communicate in terms of leveraging the media? I watch the news every night, watching the stories, and they’ve got a minister and they’ve got—you’re getting your president executive director on the television saying, we’ve been affected by this, and we’re putting together a strategy and a plan to rebuild, to continue on. Do you know how many people want to help in this situation but don’t know how to? So your communication chain of accessing people and putting people in front of the media or in front of different communication opportunities could be quintessential. But they have to have a defined message, which goes back to what we’re talking about a minute ago. Know what you’re asking for.
The second is for direct maybe more immediate funding is reaching out to disconnected people or donors. We throw terms around at times like live abundance, silent. Many people don’t know what that is. If you’re in this profession long enough, you know, you’ve—you have engaged with these terms and others like them: “last year but not this year, unfortunately.” Why is that important? Because we always lose donors, whether they were honorary donors or they were tribute donors. Maybe they gave for a number of years and they aren’t connected. There’s lots of different reasons. My wife and I, we do our philanthropy. Certain nonprofits fall off for a lot of different reasons. If you can access those people, that would be the first place I would do outreach to say, “We’ve run into a little bit of a hurdle here with this.”
We use the Los Angeles example. The fire, but we're still moving forward. We want to keep our team together. Can you help us? If you're not being able to reach out to people who maybe aren't as close?
That's an opportunity to reengage them. Now, that is on top of you doing direct outreach, personal calls to your most important donors, your most important stakeholders because they may have given a gift. It does, let's say right now, December 25th on Christmas. It's part of what they do every year. And they usually don't do that until December. But if you reach out, they may do an extra gift or two right now.
So not only is it the ones that are disconnected, you need to figure out how to reach the people that are connected and tell them we're still here. We're going to help air quotes rebuild, whatever that means. We haven't got a strategy, but we've got compensation and payroll to make. We need to serve these people still, because we have a second center, we have people doing reaching out to us.
Whatever your messaging is. So tap into those communities, those that are very close with calls, maybe a little distant, live on segment and get something and say, look, we need your help because we serve an important message and a mission here, which we'll talk about here in a moment. Number three is you may have to look at something like crowdfunding.
Not my expertise by any stretch, but there are a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to help. I'm always amazed, and I do a little bit of this on some of these GoFundMe pages, more out of curiosity not to make a gift, but I'm always fascinated by how emotional stories can raise to ten, 15, 20, 50, $100,000.
And so if you're not telling a story and a part of that, then is, is how you get the message out that you're there, which means you have to be connected to your board, to your donors. Can you share this information? Because the worst thing about crowdfunding is when it's a great cause, but nobody knows about it. How do you get that word out?
Number one is, could you tell a very quick story on on a crowdfunding page? GoFundMe is a good or bad example. Number two, getting people to talk about it. How do you promote that? Through Facebook, through LinkedIn, through other things. So engaging in a larger audience. Number three is in some way, shape or form I'm sorry.
Number four is in some way shape or form. Can you elevate your attention, your prominence in the in in this challenge by affiliating with someone who has a bigger microphone, celebrity athlete, somebody with a lot of followers who can help tell the story. This aligns with your larger audience, maybe a GoFundMe page, and aligns with kind of tapping into some communities.
Maybe you're not connected to. Maybe it's telling a story. All of this is to say, the more you talk about what's going on and why this is important, the better off you are. Number five is there's a lot of what they call CSR networks. These are corporate social responsibility networks. What this is, is a lot of businesses who want to see the community thrive because their business thrives when the community thrives.
So it could be as simple as going to a grocery store and saying, could we put canisters that say, would you leave your change or round up which is a lot more complicated because of technology, but a change here to help support this nonprofit who was caught in the fires? How do you get out into the community? Is it going to bring you big dollars?
It's not, but it may bring you enough to fill in the gaps a little bit. If your biggest donors, as we talked about a few minutes ago, your most connected people are the ones you go to first with calls, then you're doing about larger on a larger group. The live don't silence people that are in the masses. Then it's a bigger audience.
All of these things kind of sequence to get the word out. Number six, there are lots of foundations that are you can read about them. It locally if you're in this particular instance in Los Angeles. But if it was true of Harlem through North Carolina and Florida and South Carolina, it's true of Katrina. There are a lot of large nonprofits who want to help other nonprofits.
These are the behemoths. So you are in a situation where you might have an opportunity to spend and say, look, this is a one time request to help substantiate where we are and what we need to do. I'm not sure they're going to rebuild you, but they may keep you. The door is open. So look around and listen.
Do some googling. Who are the larger nonprofits? Get on the phone and make some calls to huge foundations, corporate entities say, are you providing funding so that we can would you consider a request so we can keep doing what we're doing, making a difference? A lot of that is kind of immediate as you come out of and come out of is meaning like, we've survived, we're live.
We've got to figure out a little bit longer term strategy. Two things that you can do. Number one is create solicitations directly to your constituents that target this relief. Be specific. This is why that access to data CRM is so critical because it's like the fires. You don't have an office anymore. Where are you going to go do this from now?
The world is more remote, so there's probably more options, but it's very possible you lost people in your organization, lost their home and in the nonprofit, their office. Well, where can someone go to get a computer and access information? How do you get it out? So number one, in this kind of more long term is we have a plan to continue.
Here's what it is. Would you consider a special donation to help us rebuild the nonprofit, so we can continue to do great things? Number two is in that to maximize giving. Instead of asking for a one time gift, ask for monthly donations for the next year. Would you consider a gift of $25 $50 every month on your credit card?
Because many people would struggle to make a $500 gift, but if you ask them for $50 a month and it was really important to them, they'd say, well, you know, I can move some things around as possible. So in all of this is ability to figure out how do we increase giving opportunities. Number eight, find other organizations like you in different parts of the community, what's in place and do a collaborative event.
Partner with people. Partner with local restaurants that it would be willing to say, we know how important you are. 10% of our funds tonight will go towards this. It's kind of a rebuild the nonprofit night. Maybe it's another nonprofit that knows how valuable are there clear across town. You can do something in conjunction with them to raise the elevation of the attention that you need to survive, to build, to rebuild.
All this is to say is, if you're sitting waiting for people to help, you're going to be in trouble.
Number ten digital marketing here is key. I do special trainings on the seven phases of philanthropy, the 1994 study by Prince and File. And they classify donors in seven different categories seven phases. One of that, one of them, and I'm not going to go into detail here with all of them, but it's the all twist. Someone who wants to do good.
These are people who, when they see something on television, the two groups that I think of most often who do this privately, the Red cross and the ASPCA with animals, you watch their commercials go, I got to do something to show. How do you do something similar through digital marketing, social media? How do you tell the story and give someone an option, which means you're going to have to do some, maybe some video work or writing a story.
How do you build that very quickly to tell the value of your organization, the impact that will be lost if it's not rebuilt? The last one is with your largest donors. So for a disaster like what we're dealing with in California and the size and scope of it, you may not be able to go to some of your major donors because their houses burned down, which means there is a little bit of empathy that has to come with their loss as well as yours.
And while you're fighting to figure out how am I going to rebuild my nonprofit, you the empathy and probably would come fairly naturally because you're in that emotional state as well. But it's understanding that there are others who have lost. The reason I bring this up is a part of this also is if you can get people to give extra dollars in these moments of tragedy is to thank them, because maybe there's more to come down the road when you need it again for the next portion or part of the rebuild, you have to thank them thoughtfully.
Give them a sense of appreciation. And it may be different because if your nonprofit is not there, you really can't do that. Thank you letters like you used to. It's going to become more personal. Maybe it's highlighting people that have stepped up. All this is to say is, is that just because there's a tragedy doesn't mean we can't find ways to show our gratitude.
These are just some tips in my around the with Randall 20 or so minutes in this edition of this podcast to give some thought for 99% of the people who are listening, you are not in Los Angeles and are dealing with this. But I would tell you, are you prepared to have these kind of plans if something should happen, and maybe not to the level of detail, but is there a strategies, a binder, a something in writing where you kind of deal with all of these things just to say, look, we if something happened, we could do x, Y and z for those in Los Angeles and that have been affected by this there.
There's nothing good about this story. It is tragic, sad, and it's going to be long term because of a lot of other political economic issues. But we're not going to get into this is not going to be solved. And the fires go out. This is going to continue. What I'm hopeful today is, is it gives us all a chance to realize two things.
Number one, as the first responders, those firefighters, police, anybody who's on the front line saving lives and trying to get people out of the way of harm as they do their job. Nonprofits are going to step into some of that and help people. So it's a value understanding of who we are and what we do. But number two is, is to give maybe a little bit of direction to those who are under the gun in our trying to figure out what to do.
I'm hopeful that maybe some of these tips will give you details, or at least some suggestions directionally of options to get back maybe a little bit of to what the value of what you do every day. And if you can help out a family or a nonprofit or an organization who is serving thousands of families who have lost everything, what a great way to be a philanthropist doesn't have to be big to be meaningful.
Don't forget to check out the blogs at Howard philanthropy.com. Just two weekly 90-second reads of things I see and read. Think interesting. Worth the thought. Hallett Philanthropy.com backslash blogs. And if you'd like to reach out to me it's podcast at Hallett Philanthropy.com. Don't forget what you do has a really strong effect on a lot of different people. And in this case, as we talk about tragedy and about terrible circumstances.
Nonprofits are deeply affected, and they're used to being the ones who affect those in need. Now they're just people in need and organizations in need. Don't forget my favorite saying some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened. Nonprofit work. Philanthropy is all about helping others, making the world a better place for those organizations and people that are wondering what happened.
And if you can do that as a little bit of a step to help those in this particular scenario or any other like it, or you're part of a leadership organization. I'm hoping today gives you kind of some steps to think about what we know is, is that those of us who work in this industry help people and change lives, and I don't know a better way of doing it.
I don't know how I would spend every day if I didn't think what I did made a difference. And hopefully today it makes us just a small, tiny little bit of difference for you. We'll look forward to seeing you next time right back here on the next edition of Around With Randall. And don't forget, make it a great day.