Crisis Communications Strategy for Charities | Webinar

[00:00:02]good afternoon everyone and welcome to this afternoon's ncva webinar that we pleased to host in partnership with our trusted supplier cich insurance I'm Nick the networ and engagement manager here at ncvo and it's great to be joining you online today please feel free to say hello and introduce yourself in the chat if you haven't done so already uh we're hosting today's webinar as a zoom meeting rather than in the anonymous webinar format so you'll be able to see who else is joining us online as well hopefully you may see a couple of names that you recognize over the next hour together we'll be discussing business continuity and crisis Communications helping you to develop a plan for communicating with colleagues beneficiaries stakeholders insurers and funders in times of Crisis to help us explore this in just a moment I'll be handing over to Mike Kenley a risk consultant from Zurich Insurance but before I do let's briefly run through the housekeeping slide so first Clos captions have been enabled and they'll be appearing on screen to turn these on or off please click on the CC icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen to help with accessibility in just a moment the slides for stay's event will be shared in the chat as a PDF so if it would help you can download these to zoom in and out of the slides as we go along they'll also be included in the follow-up email that we sent shortly after today's webinar the webinar is being recorded so please keep your microphones muted unless we come to you to ask a question during the Q&A we're hoping for at least 10 minutes for questions and answers in the the second half of today's webinar so if you've got a question please raise your virtual hand and we can come to you to ask your question or you can submit your question via the Q&A function in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen please bear in mind that if we do going to come to you to ask your question live uh you will also appear in the recording that will be uploaded to the ncvo YouTube channel finally we're not planning a breakfast today but if you need to step away from your computer for any reason please feel free to do so so in just a moment uh Mike will be taking off the content for this afternoon exploring business continuity and crisis Communications we'll then be joined by NC's practical support manager Lara bundock so Lara not only will not only sign post of further guidance and resources but she'll also be reflecting on her own experiences of business continuity planning and crisis Communications during her time as a CEO at a small charity called the snow drop project we'll then move over to our Q&A session which today will be facilitated by Mike's colleague Matt Hardwick a senior consultant sirc he'll be filled in your questions to both Mike and La Laura Lara sorry so without any kind of further delay um I'm pleased to hand over to the risk consultant from zich Mike good afternoon everybody thank you very much Nick um as he mentioned my name is Mike Henley I work at jerich within the risk and resilience team um the broad purpose of our team is to provide support to organizations across the third sector and the public sector with Enterprise risk management and of course business continuity which is here what we're talking about today um a little bit about my background I've been working with zerck now for about 15 months um coming up to and apparently my shared screen is black um it just kind of clicked on just as you um changed it there perfect yeah that's up I'm my um been with the team now for about 15 months and prior to that for my sins I was an internal auditor again with a focus on the public sector so again working with Charities housing associations and local authorities um and during this time I've developed uh an amount of experience working with BC and crisis Communications um so in terms of the format for today's webinar what we want to discuss is what is business continuity the importance of this and how it affects your organization the ability to review and restore those processes as quickly as possible what can happen to uh organizations in particularly Charities and how to define when a serious incident happens within your organization and what happens when things go wrong and more importantly how you can make things uh go right in the event of a crisis and finally looking at crisis Communications considering the ways in which you can communicate effectively during crisis situations to ensure that you main contain control and messaging throughout so the first question really is what is business continuity and and the definition forses the capability of an organization to continue delivery of products or services at acceptable predefined levels following a disruptive incident um I think we can all agree it's not a very exciting definition but it does hint at the amount of work that needs to be done by organizations so so that they know what their key services are how long these can be disrupted for what can happen in events um to stop things coming close to the catastrophic Edge as organizations in any form of business continuity process I encourage you to think about whether your plans and policies are effective and up to date has your plan been tested in in Anger have you um have you exercised this have been business impact analysis been conducted to view those um impacts over time and identify the prioritized services or activities that you take so within the business continuity framework there will be one sometimes more than one plan and um I wanted to touch briefly on what these plans should be um I've come up with a a small acronym that I think encompasses the four key points C the plans need to be current and by this I mean the plan needs to be reflective of your current circumstances or when you come to use it it won't be useful it's no good having a plan that was fantastic 5 years ago that is now out of date with with um irrelevant information or the wrong service attached to it the plan needs to be accessible do the people who need that plan know where they can find it they don't again you may as well not have a plan it needs to be readily available and communicated out to key staff the plan also needs plans also need to be adaptable and what I mean by this is do they have the ability to flex to any situation we don't want these plans to sit there and um operate at 150 pages long because that doesn't make them adaptable what they need to be able to do you need to able to slot it into the crisis that's happening to allow you to recover those key Services as fast as possible and finally it needs to be manageable the plan doesn't need to be that 80 to 100 pages long nor should it just become a Dumping Ground for information the plan needs to actively support you in a continuity situation only relevant and helpful information should be included here when you have your plan it should help you set that drum beat that battle Rhythm so that when you're trying to get through the crisis there is no ambiguity it allows you to get straight into doing the things that are important which is recovering key services and making sure that you can get those Services back up to a minimum level of service as quickly as possible so what exactly can happen to organizations and Charities there's a few pictures here which which sort of highlight the last 18 months of of dramatic change I think which we've seen we've seen adverse weather in terms of drought we've seen floods we've seen fires we've seen infrastructure issues um cost of living crisis finances all of these can have an impact upon your organization and it's important to be in a position to not just adapt to the to the um events that are happening but also to be able to put yourselves in a position to communicate effectively and identify when serious incidents are taking place otherwise we end up just being reactiv firefighting literally and metaphorically and what this means is that we're not proactively thinking and being able to move forward instead we find ourselves constantly on the back foot and having to defend ourselves from the ever growing barrage of new and emerging risks and events that are coming forward so how do we Define a serious incident what have you as an organization done to know when to enact your plans if you've not defined what serious is I've put down four key triggers there have you defined what a serious incident is does it mean a large Financial loss A of one or more services a loss of people are lives at risk or is it a combination of all of those things what are your triggers and red lines and you may think of these in terms of things like maximum tble periods of disruption at what point does a service or an activity fall over what is the line that we in the sand that we cannot cross that we are unhappy to move any further from who makes this decision is this the decision of your CEO your business continuity lead the head of service or can anybody make this decision it's important that information is disseminated effectively around your organization because otherwise what happens is a lot of finger pointing at the point of a crisis and no actual decisions needed to be made and finally do people know their responsibilities um it's all well and good having the most fantastic plan in the world but if nobody reads it or nobody looks at it you once again may as well not have the plan um when I first started doing business continuity work I was I was told by by someone um more senior than me they said I would much rather see a plan written on the back of a napkin but every single person knows exactly what they're supposed to do than a 50-page plan with all the bells and whistles you can imagine that nobody's ever looked at once because when it comes to the crisis it's people knowing their responsibilities and what they need to do that will help Propel the organization forward when you're thinking about is it serious you want to think about the media portrayal how is this going to reflect upon the reputation of the organization when it's reflected into the Press if you're looking across to your peers please think about what would the best or or the biggest most respected organizations do and how do they do it to make it effective you don't want to find yourself in a position of being stuck uh behind the eightball because you haven't planned and you haven't thought about the best ways to move forward and with that I want to touch on community unication what what is the worst thing that the worst case scenario there's been a number of um High PR profile cases of not just business continuity failings but also failures by organizations to successfully manage Communications in their media presence a a really I'm not going to say fantastic but a really evident example of this is is the BP deep water Horizon um tragedy where there were a series of of gaffs from the CEO there was no apparent spokesperson strategy and they had recently made Cuts in Communications and government relations funding the CEO was quoted as saying things like um what have we done to deserve this you can't believe the week that I've had and relatively I suppose it's only a small amount of oil in the Mexican Gulf none of this did their media presence any good there was little credit that they already had in the bank following incidents that had taken place in Texas and Alaska so they were already on the back foot here the Cuts had in Communications and government relations funding left them with li little opportunity to re rebuild the trust in relationships that they had damaged after the above in after the above incident and more importantly all of the gaffs overshadowed an amazing engineering response that was taking place to the spill it was an absolute car crash they could have focused on the Fantastic engineering response taken responsibility and move forward effectively but instead what happened was the CEO was Overexposed didn't appear to have had effective media training or hadn't taken any regard of the media training they had taken there are key points here surrounding the training for Cree staff in media facing work particularly the CEO within your organization you might think does it have to be the CEO who takes this responsibility on from a public perception point of view when organizations find themselves in tricky situations the public wants to see the CEO at the end of the day the book stops with them they're responsible for the company if they are not in front of the media it leads to people thinking well if you can't face the media and own up how can you take the large bonuses how can you take the big pay and how uh Mike I think your sound might have just cut out then um I'll get how can you be trusted to guide us for or spokes people for oh am I back um you are back just going to caught up with you a little bit there but um I think we're okay now where was I at um how could you trust people to um how can you trust CEOs to to run organizations when they they are not willing to to face the public when when things go wrong the the underlying Point here is when we have um media facing people within our organization there needs to be effective training as well as support and preparation before letting people run loose onto the media you don't simply just let people go you want to be able to control the narrative and get it done correctly the first time this was shown to great effect by the kegworth air disaster crash and this happened some time ago but is still used as a fantastic example of how to effectively address the media and move forwards um when when the air disaster had happened the the CEO did not have full um information around around the crash but he spoke compassionately and from the heart he did not shy away from the responsibility and actually as a result of his speaking BM grew as a business until it was acquired by ba later later on he had the world he had um he had to work work effectively to ensure that his words were were touching and moving forward he used um things such as saying these are my people these are my employees and I will take responsibility for this and he appeared to have taken note of any training he had taken which made the interview come across as compelling it's incredibly pressured to work in front of the media even if you are the most experienced CEO and spokesperson we now work in a world of sound bites and without training it can very quickly become a trial by media and even worse social media where the smallest things can be taken out of context so the lessons learn here are Communications are sometimes more important than the detail of the crisis speak compassionately but speak honestly there's no hiding place and there is no and there is little time to decide what to say so by this we want to focus on the fact that you can't shy away from the Limelight the public will find out particularly in today's rampant media being being beats being right at the at the heart of everybody we want to see someone being honest and reflective and people are quite willing to if not forgive understand in these organizations you do have to say something but it must be the right thing and said in a way that evokes sympathy and support don't rush out to to face the media if you're not sure what you're going to say I'll touch on a little bit later the golden hour it's viewed that you have one hour um to get your media present right and say the first thing so don't be in a rush use that golden hour to move forward effectively effective media management allows us to not only cont work with the public but also help us with our stakeholder engagement I'm sure many of you have seen a a graph somewhat like this before of um stakeholders with high power low interest high power High interest at the top and then low power low interest and low power High interest at the bottom what we want to do here is think about who these stakeholders are do we have corporate stakeholders staff customers service users donors Partners funders where do we lie with the media local National TV radio some of you will have huge National presences some will be more focused on the local each of these bring their own forms of relationship management when we operate within our communities have we thought about the neighborhoods the schools the emergency services that may be affected by disasters do we operate heavily in the political sphere and we therefore have to consider the the views of MPS counselors local and national government and where do these belong in this four um tier grid here and when we know who are our high power High interest um stakeholders we can then work to effectively manage them it can be best practiced to um advocate for a login learn strategy so when the stakeholders came in who asked what what was said in reply what coverage resulted in that and when you had given the response how did the stakeholders react so therefore any potential issues that are raised or any things that haven't quite gone as planned can be moved forward is Lessons Learned for the next um potential disaster that takes place when we move into crisis management I've tried to distill this down to five key points um and the first one is have a plan we we touched on the plans a little bit before there it's important to have a plan to know who's doing what what the responsibilities are and how we move forward we need to have front foot communication we don't want to wait for the barrage to come to us we can use that golden hour but then we need to have a um a way of uring that we are in constant communication and controlling and moving the narrative forward we want to use all avenues available to us so how can we get in touch to the people that matter to us as an organization social media it can it can make or break organizations in times like this um so I'll touch on that very briefly and feedback and evaluation when all is said and done are we getting the Lessons Learned played back to us so that we can continue to develop as an organization so what does a good plan look like in relation to Communications Define what a crisis looks like and when the plan should be invoked and who has that responsibility for doing that who's able to do that who sits within the crisis Communications team and what are their responsibilities templates to be put in place for external Communications do we have a a blanket media template that we can put out and change the details of a holding statement um a lot of people say they have these in place but they're not written down it it takes a surprising amount of time to write an effective Communications template if you have one ready to go and you can just change the details and the names it allows you to buy yourselves a little bit more time to understand what is going on what are our internal Communications procedures so people know who needs to be contacted what they need to say and What needs to be given to the staff to allow them to effectively fulfill their rool who are our key contacts internal and external um I don't want to see here a huge list pages and Pages along of of every separate media outlet but who do we have strong relationships with um from an external point of view and who needs to know who will definitely need to know and then we want to look at additional link documentation that's in place to support the plan uh other other policies and procedures that we can um that we can use and invoke here the plan it is important to know is not a rule book you you don't have to follow this to the letter but it is a framework and a guide to decision making and with the documented um sections above it will help set that battle Rhythm I was talking to and keep you on track to moving forwards instead of having that position where everybody's pointing at each other and not quite knowing what's going on in the heat of a crisis when we talk about um front foot Communications I've already mentioned that golden hour you have an hour to respond and respond well you don't want to be reactive because people will find out don't try and cover these things up uh we live in a world now that's um more media focused than ever and everything is instantly sharable so people will find out never think that they won't don't be reactive if you have information if you have bad news break it first and break it well make sure that your Communications are accurate and up to date like I've said you have an hour here so don't necessarily just race to say the first thing that comes to your mind because if it turns out you're wrong you find out that you've lost that window to give yourselves the best possible opportunity so be first if possible in control the narrative but if you can't be first be right and being right is more important than anything else your Communications have to be accurate and up to dat otherwise you're fighting on two fronts and it doesn't allow you to effectiv deal with the crisis at hand don't let there be a void in in the communications set the tempo and commit if you said at midday we will update you in two hours and at 2 o'cl you have nothing to say you still do the update saying the situation is is being reviewed we have no new information we will update you in a further two hours it's setting that consistent pattern so that people know that you can be trusted to give the information out and finally um put the customer and service user first those are the people who are also going to be affected by this so always ensure that at the heart of your Communications it is the customer that you're thinking about or your service user because those are the people who are being disproportionately affected by any form of Crisis particularly within the third sector when it does come to communicating um with our service users and our customers use all avenues and what I mean here is make sure you rack maximize your reach do not just stick to the obvious mediums can you utilize texts call centers signs on doors do your staff know exactly what to say do they have effective scripts and are they giving out a consistent message to ensure that your people um and your service users are aware of where they can find continued support is that message compassionate at the end of the crisis you don't want to hear that your service users felt alienated or not able to seek support because you were having a secondary issue and I don't I'm sure you don't need me to tell you but you have people who rely on you and are relying upon that service so during these crisis management um periods is important that message is consistent and compassionate to allow you to enure that you maintain the contact with the people who you need to a lot of organizations deal with vulnerable people who won't necessarily be aware or on the Internet so therefore can we use less popular mediums do we do we have local bulletin boards where we can inform people can we put signs on our doors and do we have direct phone numbers for those who are most at risk this does lead us on to the power of social media social media is a hugely powerful tool for the management of Adverse Events however you can't put that Genie back in the bottle it when dealing with social media it needs to be well Tempo it needs to be accurate but once you get it wrong on social media you will be overtaken by this um we have this conversation a lot for for things like project management you end up with trial by social media if things go wrong with the project because you haven't been able to control the narrative once things got to Facebook X um Instagram YouTube it's very hard to get back control of that narrative having an effective presence and communication via social media channels allows you to maintain messaging and reach a wide iety of people this is fantastic you can reach more people more effectively than ever before but it also means that when communicating every small mistake gets Amplified um I'm sure many of you have X or Twitter accounts and for a lot of organizations this can be the most important it's the it's the medium by which you can communicate very quickly very effectively to the whole world in in a matter of seconds whereas Facebook a lot of the time things get lost but for some Charities and organizations I appreciate that Facebook is where most of their service users are so ensure you know your audience it's pointless communicating on Instagram if you have a following that only uses Facebook or Twitter but as we regularly rely on X Facebook Instagram YouTube Twitter to to get our messages across we need to ensure that the people who are operating these accounts are aware of the crisis communications platform as we move for forward we don't want to give this permission or authority to just anybody they need to be trained they need to understand what they can and can't say are they allowed to respond to direct messages and how do they respond who do they direct um any complaints queries or concerns through to do they have scripts that they have to follow and is your comm's team aware of any additional resources that they're going to need um to support in social media presence and above all the messaging needs to align with your overall Communications plan you will need in these times to ensure that you have additional resource to provide to the communications team to allow you to effectively manage these events the final Point within the five is feedback and Lessons Learned at the end of the event it is so important to talk to to your teams and your people to gain feedback on how the process operated it's all well and good thinking that we got through everything um really effectively we did fantastically well but if you haven't spoken to the people you will never improve that service any further a really good example of this is is during the covid-19 pandemic when we go to speak to organizations about organizational resilience and business continuity and we and we work within um business continuity testing people often say well we got through Co was all right we it all obviously works and then you have to realize what happened during Co was a very prescriptive set of events the the government came up they told us what we couldn't couldn't do what we should and shouldn't do and therefore it made it very easy for organizations because everybody was in it together and there was a central mandate however if you're in the crisis on your own the only place you're going to get that feedback and Lessons Learned is from within the organization speak to your people see if the plans are up to date does everybody know their respons abilities you also need to speak to your service users and find out what can be improved here there will always be things that we can change update move forwards with if you're not speaking to your people and your s Service users you're going to find that you're stuck not moving forward and you're going to end up with a plan that is outdated and not reflective of your organization and the final point is to treat any crisis as a Learning and Development opportunity for your organization take what went well and develop it further take those Lessons Learned and build them back into your plans to help improve your organizational resilience so the next time you find yourself in an adverse or crisis based situation you know for a fact that you've learned from the previous and hopefully your response will be better and more effective this time around and thank you very much I think I'm going to pass back to Nick now briefly before passing you over to Lara perfect thank you so much Mike for that kind of overview of kind of Crisis communication and that kind of framework that we can can of them operate within um but I'm now really kind of pleased to be able to kind hand over to my colleague Lara who works our kind of practical support team but prior to joining us at ncvo um she was a CEO of a small charity called the snowjob project um and small Charities obviously going to make up a vast majority of ncva members so it' be great to hand over to to Lara and hear her Reflections around kind of Crisis Communications and um business continuity planning so Lara over to you thanks Nick and Mike thanks so much for that presentation um I think I was nudding throughout very actively throughout a lot of that so it's really nice because we've not done this presentation together but um a lot of what you've said is pretty much wrapped up on in things that um I'm going to reflect on um just for context I guess of um my previous job so I set up the charity um from scratch so it had no turnover and we were operating out of a boom cupboard in a church Hall quite literally and then over the course of 12 Years um grew that to just under a million turnover we owned a five-story building um we had 25 members of Staff um and we had about 100 uh volunteers and in the building we had seven other Charities as our tenants so our kind of risk changed over the course of 12 Years um and part of what I'm going to talk about will hopefully reflect that uh next slide thank you um so in terms of business continuity planning um just to mention that we we didn't recognize at the beginning as a small charity that we needed one and we highly underestimated the need to have one um until we hit what for us at that point in time would have been a crisis now some of the things that we have dealt with and that I'll reflect on aren't anything like the scale that Mike has talked about in terms of particularly public relations but it definitely was business continuity in terms of impacting our ability to deliver um the work to our service users and for context our service users were survivors of human trafficking uh who were living in the community um so the first time I think that we realized that we needed something like this was um probably about six years into running the organization um and we were a tenant in a building at that point in time um and our building suddenly flooded and what I mean by that is it flooded from above rather than from the ground up which is unusual um but on unfortunately the landlord hadn't done the work that he needed to do on the roof um and so water just started pouring through our ceiling um through the light fixtures we had a large community group in at the time we had computers everywhere the water was pouring in um and we had to evacuate the building immediately um and we had children in the building that we had to evacuate we did manage to get out everybody out safely it did look like something out of the Titanic I won't lie um but that kind of bought to the Forefront for me um the need to have some sort of plan and that looked like a business continuity plan um this had quite an impact on our business because we were a front-facing organization based in the community and all of a sudden we didn't have a building to operate out of um and we had to come up with a plan and that took us a little bit of time um we learned the hard way and then when the pandemic hit although I hear what Mike said about it like having a a prescriptive um we pivoted within 36 hours of being a building delivery organization to being one that could deliver in a hybrid setting we didn't stop any of our services all of our um uh service users were supported we communicated with all of our stakeholders and the big lottery and um Lloyd's Bank who were two of our large funders at the time reflected that it was one of the most effective and efficient uh turnarounds and responses to the pandemic that they'd seen from their Grant holders so having a plan really really works um it was much better than our flooded building um so my couple of Reflections one is and again Mike talked about this about making sure that it's current so one of the ways that we did this is try to make sure that you have points for review um we made sure that this was in line with our um policy schedule that went to the board in order to make sure that our policies were up to date hopefully everybody has something similar to that that goes to the board and we had a similar kind of thing that made sure that the board reviewed and looked at our business continuity plan to make sure that was up to date um for the kind of year that we were operating in the other thing to consider is when you have major service changes so for us those two big things was the purchase of a building and the reason why that suddenly became a massive change to our crisis plan was because we suddenly had tenants that we had to think about it wasn't just service users anymore it was other organizations who were relying on us providing a service to them um and we also had new stakeholders such as our mortgage provider um that we needed to make sure if there was a crisis we communicated to um and the other um major change that we had was that we took on kind of a larger national government uh contract and that put us more in the public eye and so we needed to think more carefully about the kind of messages that we would put out how that would be received um and think through some of that kind of communication run scenarios with key people again I think this was kind of referen in terms of making sure that it's like active you can do it so one of the best ways is run it um and one of the things that we picked up from doing this was a couple of things um one was things that we might not have thought of you'll all have blind spots when you're trying to think through a what a crisis might be you might think about especially now we've been through a global pandemic we could have another one um but actually it was our kind of um head administrator that said actually we need to think about things like a power outage to the building and total collapse of the internet access within the building because actually within a certain perod of time a lot of our delivery became not achievable within the building we need to have a a response plan of we need to close down the building and make sure everybody has a place to get to where they can access that it's not a massive crisis but it does impact Your Business Delivery the other thing that we identified by running the key scenario was that we had um key stakehold so service users who we couldn't easily contact quickly all at once um our service users were not from the UK and so we needed to come up with a plan and a group um that we could easily text so because we identified that in advance it meant that when a crisis hit we already had the resource that we needed so make sure you plan those things in advance um quickly mentioning on this one connect it with your risk register that goes to the board um because this looks at prevention as opposed to response because you might be able to catch some of those crisis points in advance rather than getting to the point where they do actually happen so just kind of making sure that that is uh connected up next point so stakeholders um succession planning is really important in an organization particularly of the small kind um so have a think about making sure that you got an index of who your stakeholders are and who their contact details are you cannot plan for when a crisis is going to happen you don't know whether your CEO will have just left and you'll have a new person in post you don't know if your administrator who's in charge of a lot of the kind of communicating with possibly service users is going to be off sick um so make sure you have an easy access point to find all of those things and in line with that I think Mike's already mentioned this possibly think about having a couple of scripts that you can use so that again if somebody's off sick um our Communications team was about one and a half people um so if one of those people is off sick make sure you have some script so that somebody else could pick that up and respond um internal stakeholders communicate communicate communicate um Mike already mentioned about if you've said you're going to say something but you you don't have anything to say still say something even if it's I'm sorry we don't have an update and that applies internally as well as externally that was a big lesson for me um and that can go on for quite a long period of time it might not just be two hours it might be in two weeks time in a month's time because your internal stakeholders are kind of constantly walking with you through that crisis uh and in line with that plan support wellbeing um your staff and your service users and your volunteers are probably going to be affected by the crisis and so part of your business continuity plan should consider the well-being of the people who are going to be impacted by it do you need to put in some extra support for people during that period of time and then smaller crisis um this isn't really kind of business continuity but you do need to think about smaller crisis and this is a great opportunity to do this when you're starting to have these conversations so one of the things we did is we asked the service leads uh we had four different departments to think about what kind of Crisis they might experience and does their own Department need to have a mini kind of business continuity plan or a crisis communication plan so for example one of the difficult things that happened during the time that I led snow drop um is that we had a death in service one of our service users sadly passed away um and we we needed to respond to that in a crisis and a sensitive way um it wasn't necessarily something that other people externally would know about but we needed to work out how to respond and how to deal with it effectively so thinking about how that impacts different departments is really important as the last slide these are just places that you can go for support guidance advice within ncvo um so on our website you can find advice on insurance and risk um which is the link there you can also uh look at questions to consider when you're writing a business cont continuity plan this was actually geared towards the cost of living crisis but many of these questions can be applied in general to writing your plan and then these are two kind of more delivery areas so we deliver online help and guidance and we also have a helpline that you can call if you want to talk through any difficulties and if you scan the QR code you can find that and we also deliver consultancy mentoring support as well as some training uh in different areas of business planning I think that's everything Nick perfect thanks so much L for just going to sharing your of experiences of being a CEO of a small organization um and Chanel's just going to post the links to the things that lar is just going to reference in the chat but we'll also be including of those links in the followup email as well um but for now can we've got um 10 minutes or so to kind of um ask answer any questions you might have um you can raise your virtual hand and we can come to you to ask your question live or you can pop your question into the Q&A function which you can um open by clicking on the Q&A button in the tool bar at the bottom of your screen um but M uh Matt it is am I handing over you so now can facilitate the Q&A for the next 10 minutes yeah thank you ni um and thank you both Lara for those that Insight that you gave us and um you know those sorts of stories are always more powerful than listening to the theory and and how it all goes it brings it all to life so really appreciate that and Mike thank you and you pulling that content together delivering it sharing some of those key messag really useful um we have had a couple of questions that that have come in um and actually I think perhaps you Michel might come to you first perhaps for an answer and then but laa I'm interested just perhaps again feeding in some of your own experiences perhaps around some of the these questions likely to be some insight there um so social media as as was a presence in both of what you were both saying both in terms of you how to deal with it in terms of being proactive um have you got any advice for responding potentially so in the light of an incident we may have um you know keyboard Warriors people might be seeking out trolling maybe you know um trying to antagonize a situation or trying to provoke responses potentially um I suppose Mike from a from a theoretical point of view you got any additional advice around utilizing social media and and perhaps in that responsive nature to to requ that come in and people that try and access into the organization and then Lara you welcome your thoughts in terms of your own experiences of whether you you had that yourself and what you know whether it was again trying to react and trying to deal with things on the again but might welcome thoughts you might have yeah thanks I I think the important thing to realize is is that social media is such a powerful tool and and is and as fantastic as it can be for organizations getting the message across it sort of has that equal and opposite reaction of can also be the downfall and I think it's important to notice that during a crisis situation resources are going to be stretched people are going to be fraught you're going to be time pressured to complete things whether that is just getting information out whether that's dealing with the results of of the crisis that have taken place so I I personally wouldn't wouldn't Advocate going and dealing with every individual comment that that comes through the The Message Board the Facebook the Twitter that the YouTube whatever that may be because you'll be in a constant battle with people for for hours and hours and days on Ender having said nothing but typed a lot I would encourage consistent messaging from an organization as as Lara sort of said it's it's that if you've said you're going to do it do it it's ensuring that people service users members of the community other stakeholders have that faith that when you say we will have an update even if that update is unfortunately there's been no change in the situation we are going to do that it's ensuring that the messaging that you get out is is in line with the with the corporate brand with the the communications policy and that everybody who's operating in that sort of social media Sphere for your organization knows exactly their remit um but in terms of of dealing with the with the trolls with the keyboard Warriers I would say you know we we leave that alone allow that to to sort of sit to one side um and and focus on the key messages that are going to help your organization and the service users understand what's going on L is there you know any experiences or or insights that you you'd like to add on to that yeah sure I mean really similar to what Mike was saying don't need J to anything that comes through that's one of the worst things that you can do is respond out of you know emotion or or those kind of things because it doesn't come across well um usually on social media um most people understand a keyboard Warrior is just a keyboard Warrior and won't often give much attention there is a difference between a keyboard Warrior and potentially a genu complaint um and if it is a if you feel like it's more of a genuine complaint possibly offer them a place where they can Lodge a formal complaint if they wish to or an email address that they can contact UM in terms of responding I would say the same thing don't really give them a whole lot of air room just a quick uh a case study of what happened we had somebody after we bought the building um we got quite a lot of keyboard Warriors and what boues who were like we can't believe this building is going to people who are helping victims of trafficking and people coming from abroad why aren't you helping people from our country why aren't you helping the homeless why aren't you helping the etc etc etc um and my communications manager had a bit of a freak out and contacted me and was like I don't know what to do um and I kind of said well you know let me have a look and and go and have a see what's happening and I went on and actually all of our supporters drowned out their voices cuz a lot of them took up arms against the trolls for us and just basic basically said you clearly don't know anything about this charity you need to look into them this is one of the best things that could have happened if you care so much about the homeless go and support them stop kind of taking on one and actually we didn't need to do anything because our supporters backed us up and we just we literally didn't need to say anything at all um so yeah never never knee jerk thank you um Mike you you you mentioned within your session the presentation and L picked up on on the point around um testing of plans and and building that into uh into organizations I suppose aligned to this that we've got a question around um how can we be sure how can organizations be sure that that their plans that they've created that you know we've sat down we've put some content into this how can we be certain that those plans are effective at the point at which we need them to be um and you know welcome any thoughts as spe dive into the testing element of it but um yeah over to yeah the the base the base point is is Let's test the plan um when when I mentioned Co covid before it people thought their business continuity plans were were in a really good spot because of covid but what happened was we had prescriptive instruction and then when it comes to isolated instance that affect one organization sometimes they find well actually this plan hasn't been dusted off in Anger alone for maybe five six seven eight years and it makes it out of date so when going through the business continuity plan I would encourage you to strip out anything that you feel isn't 100% necessary in a crisis situation so really what you want is who's in your your gold silver your strategic operational whatever you call them who's in those teams and what their responsibilities are what do our what do our activation procedures look like what does even potentially the initial meeting and the ongoing meeting agendas look like just some very broad Strokes descriptions there to sort of say well actually when we get into the room this is what we need to be talking about what's the event who's affected what does it look like who have we contacted what are the responsibilities do we have everybody we need in the room to stop that initial worry about what we need to be speaking about and then at at the back of the the sort of plans you can you can have um those key services that you need to pick up and and how do we pick those Services up in the in the immediate the short term and then the medium term so you're looking at maybe a a short term of less than a week and a medium term of a week plus and and what we do and then also having things like um decant logs if you need them um instant management logs decision logs just at the back of that plan so that when it comes to it everything you need to combat a situation is is there in front of you and if you're not sure if it's working test it if you're not sure if people understand their responsibilities test it because it's much better to sort of fail in the in the classroom than fail when the crisis has emerged and you find yourself struggling to to deal with it and you you're being reactive in instead of proactive um as Lara mentioned in story having that plan allows the organization to to maneuver effectively and add and in an agile way which puts you so much further ahead than an organization who doesn't have those plans in place and I think that's the important thing have the plan test it if it doesn't work tweak it if it doesn't work tweak it and when the crisis comes you'll you'll have a readymade well old machine yeah thank you Mike and um Laura will come to you with SEC but I'm just going to on to that my own experiences of you know working the same team as Mike and supporting some of our organizations in in those testing environments that failing in the classroom is a really a really key point and one of the beauties of testing is you can throw in hypothetical scenarios so you say okay right we've now dealt with this test but but what would we do if the CEO was on holiday and we couldn't get them and and then what does that change within the plan we you know you need that degree of agility and resilience into it so yeah that was just a point I was throwing but but Lara welcome your own experiences or any additional comments you want to throw what Mike said no I everything that both of you said is is spot on um in terms of I make sure that you have one is like I said I Lear the hard way um test it I mean in an ideal world because I know how stressful it can be and how many things get in the way and business as usual kicks in um put a date in the diary just a random date once a year that is scheduled out for business continuity testing and you invite all the key people to that and so then it's a non-negotiable in the diary um and you make sure you do that every year um so that's I guess one sort of practical in terms of the testing um and the other thing to kind of say is once you got into the crisis and you're handling it and you're you're you're following your business continuity plan also just to say you are already going to be on highight you're going to be responding you're going to be doing those things remember to have some levels of Grace for yourself um because you're not going to please Anybody Everybody you're not going to get it 100% right it is a crisis it's okay to I think one of the slides that Mike shared was like it's important to be human and not always right and so showing that humanness in the situation that you are human and trying to get your organization through a crisis is super important and just off the back of that in terms of well-being if you are a CEO and you know you are thinking about that inance make sure that you have someone that you can talk to outside of your charity not even on the trustee board where you can just debrief and go oh my goodness this is really hard because it'll be hard um and it's really important that you have those safe people that you can talk to and then reflect kind of as Mike's already said once you've gone through it reflect get input get insight change your business continuity plan ins sight of that because you probably won't just face one crisis yeah thank you Lord um I think TimeWise probably got one one last question and Laura I might actually come to you first given your own sort of past experiences and the role that you had at the previous organization um and and you touched on this within your presentation about you communicating with the board and things like that but I'm interested in terms of top tips on on how to build the importance and and bring people along the change with you and you know demonstrating the the role that they have and how um you know they have that role within you know the change within the crisis Etc just any top tips from past experiences that you might have got from from that situation yeah of course so uh I would say one of the things is well the top thing is communicate like I cannot state that enough and I know it's called the crisis this is a crisis communication but communication has to be at the Forefront of everything that you do and within that um try to think about different styles of communic ation as well so don't just assume that because you've communicated I don't know via a team meeting that you've done it like you've communicated like it may be that you need to communicate in a number of different styles so it might be that you need to do a team meeting and a follow-up email and you might also need a text message or social media or some other sort of thing like think through the different varieties of communication that you need um pull together your key members as quickly as possible and make sure that they are all clear on their roles that's really important and in terms of when you as the again I'm speaking as the CEO here but when you have to be the person who gets out there as Mike said it is really important the CEO takes responsibility and they're seen um make sure you are seen that is really important um people in a situation of Crisis do look to somebody to lead them through it and so it's it's a careful balance of being confident that we can get through this and communicating that so other people don't go into a massive Panic um but showing your humanness in terms of this is the plan I'm confident we can get through this bear with me as we navigate this we're working together as hard as we can and similarly one last thing is make sure there is Communications channels availability available in both directions so that you can communicate to them but also you can take communication from staff members or that there is an Avenue for service users to be able to communicate back to you and take that graciously kind of humbly because they will be seeing things that possibly you aren't seeing at the top so make sure you're open to feedback during that period of crisis in some way really um Nick in the interests of time shall I hand it back to you to to sort of thank you and wrap us up but certainly from from M and Mike's part of you I really appreciate the opportunity for to come on absolutely thanks so much and thanks for everyone for submitting your kind of questions and to L and to Mike thank you for such of practical responses as well um so that almost brings us to the close of today um but before we go um my colleague Chanel was about to launch a two question snap poll that will appear on your screen any second now to get your initial thoughts on how you found today's webinar if you'd like to provide some additional feedback um a short survey will appear in your browser when you leave this meeting and for us it would be great to hear about the things that you enjoyed where we could make improvements and what further guidance and support would be helpful from ncvo also I just want to highlight that um if you're not yet a member of ncvo we would love to have you join our community of every 17,000 organizations from the biggest out Charities to the smallest Community groups and for us our members are at the heart of everything that we do and we exist to make your lives that little bit easier so that you can focus on things that really matter and make the biggest impact to the communities that you serve you can find out more information about becoming a member on the ncvo website um so before we sign off on behalf of canara and colleagues at NC I'd like to give a special thanks to Mike and to mat for their time and their expertise today and a huge thank you to all of you as well for joining us I hope today's webinar has provided a helpful overview of business continuity planning and crisis Communications and that you feel better equipped should a Crisis occur in the future um again please spare a couple of minutes to share your feedback with us as you leave but for now enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to seeing you again in the near future