The City Club of Cleveland is one of the nation’s great free speech forums. A product of the Progressive Era, it was founded in 1912 and is one of the nation’s oldest continuous independent free speech forums, renowned for their tradition of debate and discussion. For more than a hundred years, all of their speakers—from […]
By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you know we’re constantly encouraging you to have a crisis management/crisis communications plan in-place before something happens. We are also constantly reminding you understand that you only have minutes to respond to a crisis situation; to train and test your team; to […]
[By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications] David Wolowitz is an attorney with McLane Middleton, a law firm in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He is also one of the country’s most in-demand experts on sexual misconduct, with a focus on independent schools. We first met David a number of years ago when we served on a panel together. […]
By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications Those who know me know that I’m a travel junkie. Time and budget prevent me from taking all the trips I’d like to take, so I do a fair amount of armchair travel. That includes skimming the daily email feed I get from Conde Nast Traveler – a publication I’ve […]
By Jim McKay, writing for Emergency Management: How the Medical University of South Carolina, a 700-bed medical center with six colleges, honed its crisis communications strategy and methodology and was able to continue operations during Hurricane Florence last September. As Hurricane Florence whipped through the Carolinas creating havoc last September, the Medical University of South […]
From Lauren Collister, University of Pittsburgh, writing for The Conversation: When it comes to texting, the period, full stop, point – whatever you call it – has been getting a lot of attention. People have begun noticing slight changes to the way our smallest punctuation mark is deployed, from declarations that it’s going out of style to […]
From John Schwartz, writing for the New York Times: Don Guckert’s job is keeping the buildings on the University of Iowa’s charming campus up and running, and safe. His most important lessons came from the worst days of his career, in June 2008, when the waters of the Iowa River washed across the campus, causing […]
The majority of work referred to Hennes Communications comes from attorneys, who are often “first responders” when bad things happen to good companies and organizations. Subsequently, we’re often retained by the attorney or law firm in order to help assist them in preparation for trial. It’s called “litigation communications” and here’s a great piece on […]
NOTE: We are very much aware of the fact that many mayors, city managers and city safety directors are not prepared to handle disasters, more often than not depending on their police and fire chiefs to “handle things.” As you’ll see in the article below, mayors, city managers and safety directors have distinct duties that […]
From the Harvard Research and Inc.: Making a great first impression is so much better than having to overcome a bad first impression. But it’s easier said than done. Big first impressions come from small talk done well–something most of us struggle with. We end up defaulting to highly generic and ineffective tropes like “What do you […]