The Komen v. Planned Parenthood debacle continues to fascinate me. As I wrote earlier this week, I disagree with Komen's decision to cut its funding for PP's cancer screening programs (which they reversed today). That hasn't changed... but it's Komen's exceptionally poor handling of the entire situation that's interesting to me, just because of what I do for a living.
I've been where Komen's administration was this week. And it's just about impossible to change the conversation when people take what you've done so personally and when information (and sometimes misinformation) can spread so rapidly. The time to fix something like this is before it blows up. Once the horse is out of the barn, all you can do is mitigate the damage, but you can never completely cure it. Even if you assume that every single thing Komen said this week is completely true, a lot of their former supporters will never completely trust them again.
But how do you handle a PR crisis before it starts? You just have to prepare as well as you can. You know your organization well enough to know who your constituents are and where their hot buttons are (and that those buttons may be different for different groups). You don't have the luxury of pretending that everyone loves you and will always trust you no matter what. Komen was one of the most respected nonprofits in this country, and a reputation built over 30 years took less than 24 hours to be turned on its head. Because someone in a position to do so didn't plan ahead.
OK, so, assuming that Komen's policy change late last year not to award funding to groups under any kind of investigation was indeed about better stewardship. At some point, when whoever it was noticed that, oops, that includes Planned Parenthood, that's when the Komen staff should've asked themselves one basic question - who is going to piss off?
PR crises happen when someone who's invested in your organization feels slighted, or caught off guard, or taken advantage of. It could be a customer, or an employee, or a legislator who's helped you out in the past, or in this case millions of women who support the goals both of Komen and Planned Parenthood. These are the people who do NOT need to read about your potential bomb on Facebook. They need to hear from you directly so that you set the narrative (as best you can).
Someone high up at Komen should've been on the phone with every politician who's ever done them a favor, every head of every affiliate, every top supporter (they have email, don't they?), and all of that BEFORE they released a statement to the press. Someone should've had the sense to grasp that cutting off Planned Parenthood, the lightning rod that it is, would be seen as a political move even if it wasn't. Someone should've looked through the books and found all of the other under-investigation groups that Komen still funds (ahem, Penn State). Someone should find a way to deal with the fact that "We're assessing the effectiveness of grantee programs so that we can better steward our resources" is a harder story to tell than "Komen hates poor people."
And even if Komen didn't manage to get ahead of the story, they still could've handled things better. Sometimes things blow up out of nowhere. But it's still true that PR crises don't happen unless someone feels wronged. (It's not a media story unless there's more than one side.) And that's when you do everything you can to get everyone on the same side, which usually means you're the one who's going to have to move. You listen. You don't pretend that the people who are angry with you don't exist, or worse, say on national TV that they're uninformed.
It's kind of shocking that an organization that's been so sophisticated in its marketing could be so bad at negotiating what could've been a relatively straightforward PR issue. In my experience, the organizations that struggle to respond to situations like this are the ones who identify the institution's reputation too closely with their own. It must be incredibly hard for Nancy Brinker to look objectively at the nonprofit she founded in memory of her own sister, but that's what you have to do. When you believe that the organization is you and you are the organization, it's harder to consider how all of the other people who care about, say, Race for the Cure, are feeling. Especially if you're a nonprofit, utterly dependent on the goodwill of your donors and volunteers to survive. Everyone who's ever worn a pink ribbon has a stake in Komen, and Komen's leaders lost sight of that this week.
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