The Nature Conservancy’s relationship with BP, the company responsible for the massive oil spill off the Gulf Coast, has put the environmental organization squarely in the middle of a controversy.
The relationship, first detailed in The Washington Post, has raised questions about whether it was it violating its mission by accepting money from an oil company.
It has also offered a case study for how a charity in crisis can use social-media tools to communicate its message to potential supporters.
In fact, in advance of the Post story, the charity had been using its blog to explain its relationship with BP.
Once the story was published and users on Twitter and Facebook were talking about the controversy, the charity began responding directly to those users by pointing them to the blog post.
The Nature Conservancy took the effort a step further on Tuesday, giving supporters and critics a chance to ask questions directly to three of its leaders, including Mark Tercek, its president, in a live discussion.
The event, which used the live blogging tool CoverItLive, offered a two-way conversation about the charity’s relationship with BP.
What do you think of the Nature Conservancy’s social-media approach to this controversy? Are there other examples of groups that have used social media to handle controversial topics? Post a comment to share your thoughts.
One Response to Social Media as a Crisis-Communications Tool
nwallace - May 27, 2010 at 11:12 am
I’m submitting the following comment on behalf of Amy Ganderson of The Nature Conservancy, who contacted me directly with the following. I am including it with her permission.
Here is Ms. Ganderson’s comment:
“My name is Amy Ganderson, I’m an employee for The Nature Conservancy managing our social media strategy. I’ve been working with a small team of 4 people on the response to the questions about our relationship with BP in the online space. First, I’d like to thank you for the post. You’ve shared with your readers a nice recap of our efforts. I’ll like to share my perspective on what we’ve done so far and where we need to go from here.”The biggest takeaway for me was to listen, respond, and engage. People were talking about our brad and as a communicator, I have a responsibility to connect with them — openly and honestly.”One of our best decisions was to host the live chat yesterday with Mark, Glenn, and Keith. It allowed us to have the general public talk directly to our leadership and air their concerns. We’ve received a number of questions in the social media space over the last few days and consequentially, a pattern emerged in the types of questions we received. This chat allowed us to highlight the major heavy-hitter questions. Also, it demonstrated that our leaders are thinking about these issues deeply and are engaging them head-on, giving supporters a glimpse into this process in a way that a blog post and statements can’t.”Going forward, we will continue to engage concerns on our blog, Facebook page, Twitter, other blogs, and forums like this one. We will not only be good listeners, but also try to articulate our true relationship with BP as best we can. In the short term we need to continue the conversation — it’s not just about good listening, it’s about communicating and clarifying our message.”For the long term, we need to keep asking ourselves the tough questions. Is our communication strategy staying true to our core mission and vision? Are we communicating the policies set by our leadership through our online channels clearly and honestly? I know for me, those are the types of questions I’ll be thinking about when I write that next Facebook post or Tweet. And hopefully everyone in the nonprofit industry does the same. Thanks again for the post!”