June 24, 2024
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The Role of School Boards and Superintendents in Crisis Management
Ensuring the safety of students is a collective responsibility, with school board members and superintendents playing a crucial role. In today’s world, where school safety is increasingly at stake, it is imperative that these leaders receive adequate crisis management training and share lessons learned to effectively address the challenges they face.
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Hennes Communications Listed Among Top Advisors to the Legal Profession
Hennes Communications has been named among the top crisis PR firms in the U.S. by Chambers and Partners, the leading independent professional legal research company in the world, making the firm one of only 18 firms listed in the Crisis & Risk Management professional advisors’ category. Chambers and Partners provides detailed rankings and insights into the world’s top lawyers, legal departments and select professional advisors who work with the legal profession to provide closely aligned services.
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How America Turned Stories Into Weapons of War
A story can entertain and inform; it can also deceive and manipulate. Perhaps few stories are as seductive as the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves — those reasonable, principled creatures so many of us presume ourselves to be.
As Annalee Newitz writes in “Stories Are Weapons,” propaganda is premised on exploiting the discrepancy between surface beliefs and unconscious motives. A clever propagandist can get any number of people who see themselves as invariably kindhearted to betray their ideals. Newitz gives the example of anti-immigration campaigns: Make humans so fearful that even pious, churchgoing grandmothers will countenance rounding up their fellow humans in detention camps.
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Online Rumors Sparked by the Trump Assassination Attempt Spread Rapidly, on Both Ends of the Political Spectrum
In the immediate hours after the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, social media users posted the same videos, images and eyewitness accounts but used them as evidence for different rumors or theories that aligned with their political preferences. We have seen groups of people coming together during previous crises to make sense of what is going on by providing evidence and interpreting it through different political or cultural lenses called frames. This is part of a dynamic process scholars call collective sensemaking.
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Forget Storytelling. CEOs Must Learn Better Crisis Communication
When responding to a crisis or a major issue, CEOs need to speak clearly, with authority and empathy. What then to make of the latest advice from consultants McKinsey, whose expert on “go-to-market and omnichannel strategy, agile sales and marketing transformation” proposes that Chief Executives should be their companies’ Chief Storytellers. She advises that having a great story “creates a virtuous circle” which “accelerates and pressure-tests ideas" and “creates a flywheel to fuel employees to drive value for the company.” And that CEOs are “positioned uniquely to make communications a team sport."
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It’s Time Corporates Stopped Trying to be Political Players
With universities tying themselves in knots over free speech and campus protests, and corporations struggling to decide what to say on high profile issues, it’s time to revisit whether management should speak up or shut up. Despite the headlines and dramatic TV footage, there are clear signs that some organisations are increasingly questioning the wisdom of getting drawn into divisive controversies, and public expectation is also beginning to change.
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‘No Comment’ Is Morphing Into No Response
Former Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi has a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review highlighting the trend of companies and others not even responding to reporters’ calls for comment. Farhi did Nexis searches and found that mentions of the phrase “did not respond to a request for comment” rose from 728 stories in May 2014 to 1,590 in May 2019 to 3,616 in May 2024. Farhi notes that the phrase shows up in stories on topics as varied as politics, business and sports and outlets as varied as newspapers, newscasts and blogs.
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Communicating Purpose in the Age of Polarization
For brands with a mission, the success of PR and marketing often rests on uniting people behind a common cause, such as climate change or gender equality. But in these polarizing times, political views shape people’s attitudes to purpose-related issues. Rather than bringing people together, research shows that highlighting the seriousness of a cause through outspoken and progressive messaging is actually driving a wedge between Americans at a time when unity is needed.
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8/2/24 Ohio Municipal League
9/23/24 Indiana School Boards Association Fall Conference/Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents
9/24/24 Ohio Trucking Association
10/21-23/24 Managing Partner Bootcamp
10/28/24 Massillon Chamber of Commerce
11/11/24 Ohio School Boards Association Capital Conference
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11/20/24 N.E. Ohio Association of Financial Professionals
12/5/24 FBI & Center for Education Safety
12/9/24 Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association
12/13/24 Northern Ohio Area Chambers of Commerce
3/21/25 Consortium of State School Boards Annual Conference
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