Creativity From Chaos: When Crisis Creates Opportunity

No doubt the last two months looked different than we all expected, and chances are you’ve already faced some difficult decisions about how to reconcile your organization’s plans with our current reality.

It’s not a question of if we need to pivot our strategies, it’s how much, when, toward what new direction, and with what resources. Those are precisely the conversations that took place this Spring with our partners at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health (LACDMH). Every year, Cause Communications helps LACDMH produce WE RISE, a month-long spotlight on healing and wellness through art, music and creative expression. Plans were set for creating another immersive, community-driven experience with dozens of in-person events – and excitement was building among thousands of community members who have turned to WE RISE as a safe, nurturing, and artistic gathering place.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes peek at how plans for WE RISE changed course (in a major way!) without sacrificing impact, and five best practices you can implement in your own organization as you navigate the road ahead.

Be true to who you are. Lean into your organization’s brand identity and guiding values: they offer an anchor and touchstone that you can count on when everything else feels uncertain. Conversations about what to do and how to communicate about it become clearer and more focused when you remember what makes your organization unique and what your audiences are relying on you to deliver. For WE RISE, that impacted everything from what tone to strike in e-blasts (enthusiastic yet reassuring) to what type of color palette to use in this year’s digital materials (bold, energetic, and inviting). And for messaging, COVID-19 provided an opportunity to lift up LACDMH’s mission and emphasize why programming centered around mental health and wellbeing is vital at this time.
Keep communicating – with honesty. When faced with tough decisions in times of turmoil, it’s ok to take a moment to regroup. But now, more than ever, clear and consistent communications is essential, and your audiences need to hear from you with the right message at the right time. Once WE RISE made the decision to go completely virtual with a full month of live digital programming, we proactively issued a press release about the pivot and drafted tailored messages for key groups like the artists who had participated in past years’ events. Even before all the details of the new virtual format were worked out, we provided succinct and transparent updates about what was happening, why those decisions were made, and how artists would still be able to contribute to the 2020 experience in meaningful ways.
Keep your audience at the center. When communicating about changes your organization is making, always offer some insight into why the decision was made but remember to frame it in ways that resonate with each audience group. Explain how the pivot supports your broader mission and how it benefits that specific audience group. In April, LACDMH experienced a 20% jump in call volume for its Helpline – a clear signal that this was not the time to be quiet or pull back on resources. In fact, the re-imagined WE RISE experience was positioned as a solution and a service: Audiences saw that the pivot was not a hasty or lesser “plan B,” but rather a source of connection and community they were missing and craving.
Engage and empower key stakeholders. Keep your audiences informed, and then take it one step further by finding ways to make it fun and easy for them to contribute to your new plan’s success. This is especially true for stakeholders like your Board of Directors, funders or grantees, staff, and volunteers. For WE RISE, we always followed our “why”-driven updates with a clear call to action so audiences knew exactly how they could add value to a cause and initiative they already believed in. We also produced a simple digital toolkit with all the assets they might need to deliver on what we were asking: key messages, a pre-written newsletter blurb and social media content, sample visuals for inspiration, and branded image files they could use. These simple steps enabled WE RISE to expand its reach into new networks of participants and supporters. And best of all, stakeholders felt even more connected to the mission and the work as a result.
Collaborate. Collaborate. Collaborate. Partnership is key when navigating unexpected changes, both internally and externally. WE RISE was able to pivot quickly and seamlessly only because every team – including communications, programs, development, and senior leadership – worked together. With all of these strategic voices at the table from the outset, the cross-departmental collaboration resulted in new ideas and made it easier to identify and solve potential challenges along the way. And as new plans were developed, we discovered opportunities for new external partnerships that would not have been possible had we stuck to last year’s format. Use pivots to push the envelope creatively and try something new.

We want to hear from you! How are you, as communicators, reshaping your work? In what ways are you unleashing strategic communications to support the organizational changes taking place right now? Drop us a line at info@causecomm.org or tweet at us @CauseComm.