What ACORN Can Teach Us About Crisis & Issues Management…

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Torod Neptune — Leave a Comment

Torod B. Neptune

 If you haven’t read or heard about the recent troubles of activist group ACORN by now, you’ve likely been hiding under a boulder somewhere.

 To set the stage, let me quickly recap the last seven days of ACORN activity:

• ACORN employees were caught on video and apparently giving advice to a couple — posing as a prostitute and pimp — on how to either blatantly lie about the source of their income or launder the money to get housing assistance in order to purchase a house they said they intended to operate as a brothel. The video footage has been appearing widely on the Internet and TV. It’s the 24/7 news cycle scandal du jour.
• To make matters worse, it’s also been revealed that the ACORN board forced out its founder last year after his brother allegedly embezzled nearly $1 million. The money was later repaid by an anonymous donor, without the full knowledge of the organization’s board of directors.
• In the aftermath Congress moved to cut off the organization’s federal funding, and several states have moved to do the same (at least pending a complete investigation). In response, ACORN has suspended the admission of new clients into its programs pending the outcome of its own internal investigation, and today it appointed a former Massachusetts attorney general to investigate its housing program and other public service projects.

So, while completely avoiding opining about the political questions surrounding ACORN, its history, and organizational mission, there are some invaluable lessons to be learned from this episode — purely from the crisis and issues management vantage point. What lessons should communications professionals take away from the recent ACORN troubles? I see three obvious ones:

Lesson 1: Make A Plan … Before You Need One

Clearly there were what I call “latent issues” within ACORN’s business model that made it a logical and natural target for some form of crisis, albeit perhaps not one of this magnitude. Given ACORN’s more than 400,000 members, offices in 75 cities in the U.S. and abroad, and the untold challenges inherent in managing a decentralized organization so heavily embedded in local communities, local politics and local issues, it’s unfortunately not too hard to imagine a circumstance under which an employee somewhere would engage in an activity that would bring elevated scrutiny to the organization at best, and complete ignominy at worst.

Add to this that ACORN already had attracted partisan lightning strikes over allegations (always denied by ACORN) that it was falsifying voter registration lists and was involved in partisan politics on behalf of one political party. A proactively developed and exercised crisis plan for this potential would have gone a long way toward avoiding ACORN’s confused response to the initial allegation — if not significantly mitigating the impact of the allegations. If such a plan existed, clearly there were some kinks to be worked out.

Lesson 2: Fight Fire With Fire

Waggener Edstrom Worldwide (WE) staff would be among the last group to underestimate the power and influence of new media as a valuable communications tool when attempting to reach publics. But, as we often do, we recommend audience-centric communications, which essentially means FIRST identifying the audience you’re attempting to reach and then segmenting the diverse communications tools that are available so as to determine how to achieve influence. I challenge anyone to locate the new and social media tools used by ACORN to respond to the emerging crisis.

 Lesson 3: Respond Quickly

Data from our team’s collective crisis management experience confirms that if you’re unable to quickly insert your POV in to the dialogue surrounding a given crisis within the first 48 hours — when opinions are being formed in the public consciousness — then your ability to insert your POV and have it heard are drastically reduced. So, while the ACORN leadership made many of the right statements, the real problem is that these statements were made too late to influence the larger echo chamber. Yes, eventually ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis pledged do whatever was necessary “to re-establish the public trust” and soundly condemned the actions of the employees who appeared in the video, but this was too little, too late.

 Hopefully we’ll all take these lessons to heart so we’re prepared if and when our clients find themselves in a crisis situation of this magnitude. The ACORN episode confirms that planning, dexterity and speed are the essential tools for managing a crisis.