Should We Put Out a Statement?
By Seth Chalmer for Stanford Social Information Review
“Should we put out a statement?”
If you’re a nonprofit communications professional, you’ve heard that question many times, often the day after some major news event. Since the October 7 massacres in Israel and subsequent war in Gaza, many nonprofits have struggled to decide whether and how to respond publicly.
That decision is more difficult if there are passionate disagreements about the issue among professional teams, boards, funders, and community partners. It’s often impossible to talk about public advocacy without inflaming internal disagreements—and that’s scary. When passionate ideological divisions arise on a team, they can be painful, time-consuming, and damaging to organizational culture. Understandably, employers often try to avoid workplace conversations about divisive topics.
Norms that prevent needless and unproductive arguments are great, but reluctance to touch controversy often goes too far. If everyone is too nervous even to mention that people in the organization may hold divergent views about a hot-button issue, that’s a recipe for enormous tension if and when the subject becomes unavoidable.
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