Crisis Communications – The Dixon Group LLC

Mature organizations have a senior leader everyone trusts. That is exactly the problem.

By the time an organization reaches maturity — a stable budget, a long-tenured leader, a board that has served together for years — it has usually developed a quiet, unspoken crisis plan. The plan is: the senior pastor will handle it. Or the executive director. Or the founder who is still in the building.

This is a particular kind of mistake. It confuses moral authority with operational capacity.

Senior leaders carry the institution’s spiritual authority. They are rarely the right person to monitor social media at 2 a.m., draft a statement while on the phone with the denomination’s legal office, and coordinate the review of that statement before it goes out. Mature organizations do not lack leaders. They lack teams — working units with defined roles, authority, and accountability that activate when the crisis hits.

A routine afternoon

You never know when an ordinary day will turn into a legal standoff. I once had to field an urgent call from an attorney representing a former pastor who had been accused of fraudulently registering a business name and signing vendor contracts under it. The lawyer was demanding board-voted documents from the new pastor right then and there.

I had to step in, firmly refer the attorney to the county courthouse for public records, and instruct him that all further legal inquiries had to go through our legal counsel. It was exactly the kind of moment that reveals whether an organization has a team or a hero. A hero improvises under pressure and hopes. A team knows its limits and knows who the legal liaison is before the phone rings.

The Crisis Communication Team

A Crisis Communication Team is not a committee that meets to admire the senior leader’s plan. Every member has a specific job that no one else is doing. For most mid-sized organizations, those jobs are:

Crisis Director — the single point of decision authority. Convenes the team, signs off on statements, makes the go/no-go calls.
Designated Spokesperson — the single public voice. Trained, calm, credible, available. Not necessarily the Crisis Director; sometimes the wisest move is to keep the senior leader away from the cameras.
Communication Lead — drafts statements, manages the press list, coordinates internal messaging.
Social Media Lead — monitors platforms in real time, posts approved content, flags trends.
Legal Liaison — reviews statements before release; advises on disclosure obligations.
Pastoral Care Coordinator — ensures victims, families, staff, and community receive direct human support. The institutional conscience of the team.
Documentation Lead — keeps the crisis log: every action, decision, and communication, with timestamps. Invisible until the after-action review, when it is invaluable.
Board Liaison — keeps governance informed at the right level without dragging the board into operational decisions it should not be making.
Denominational or Network Liaison — coordinates with the wider body. In connectional systems, this role is non-negotiable for any serious crisis.

Smaller organizations combine roles. Larger ones multiply them. What matters is that every function is owned.

Choose composure over credentials

The temptation in a mature organization is to give every job to the most professionally credentialed person available. Resist it. Crisis work is performed under acute stress, often in the middle of the night, often when emotions in the room are running high. The right people are not necessarily the most polished. They are the most composed, the most spiritually grounded, and the most reliable.

Look for spiritual maturity that will hold under pressure. Look for composure tested in scenario exercises — not assumed from a résumé or a pulpit performance. Look for diversity of perspective — age, gender, ethnicity, lay and clergy — because a team that all thinks alike will all miss the same things. Look for availability, including evenings, weekends, and the day you gather for worship. Crises do not respect the calendar.

The question mature organizations do not want to ask

Here is where maturity becomes a liability. Define, in writing, before the crisis: who can authorize a public statement? A press conference? An independent investigation? An emergency expenditure? These authorities should be located clearly enough that no one wastes time looking for permission at 2 a.m.

And then ask the question that long-tenured, well-loved leadership makes uncomfortable: What happens when the senior decision-maker is unavailable — or is the subject of the crisis?

The board chair should have standing authority to convene the team and act on behalf of the institution if the senior leader is implicated. This is not paranoia. It is prudence. The organizations most damaged by leadership scandal are almost always the ones where no one had the authority — or the courage — to act without the leader’s permission, because the leader had never been anything but trustworthy.

Build the escalation path while you still trust everyone. That is the only time it can be built.

Step 5: Practice

A team that has never trained together will not perform together. Tabletop exercises are the single highest-leverage investment a mature organization can make in its readiness. They do not require expensive consultants. They require a willing team, a realistic scenario, and an afternoon.

A workable annual rhythm: January, review the risk assessment and update the roster. March: run a tabletop on a financial or misconduct scenario. June, run a digital simulation on a social media escalation. September: review and update the holding statements. December, conduct the year-end readiness audit.

Heroes do not save institutions in crisis. Teams do. Build yours before you need it. Train it on a cadence. Clarify authority in writing. And within the next 30 days, send each person on your team a one-page memo outlining their role, training schedule, and after-hours contact expectations.

If a crisis broke this weekend, who would activate your team? Do they know they would?

This article draws on Chapter 3 of my book, Crisis, What Crisis? A Guide to Crisis Communication for Churches and Non-Profits. Next in this series: why leadership transitions are when your crisis plan quietly expires. To get the book, visit: https://books.by/drkenn-dixon

#CrisisCommunication #NonprofitLeadership #ChurchLeadership #BoardGovernance #LeadershipDevelopment

The growth years are when organizations are busiest — and when the risk map they never drew starts to matter.

“Why plan for what God may not allow?” I have heard some version of this from sincere leaders in growing organizations for twenty years. It sounds spiritual. It is profoundly unbiblical. Here is the theology of preparedness — and the one document your board should produce this year.

Growth is intoxicating. New members, new programs, new staff, a building campaign, a second campus, a grant that doubles the budget. The growth years are when leaders are most energized, most stretched, and most likely to say: “We’ll get to the crisis plan when things settle down.”

Things do not settle down. And growth does not reduce risk. It multiplies the surface area on which risk can land — more people, more money, more data, more programs for children, more public visibility. The organization that was too small to have a crisis plan in year two is, by year six, too big not to.

The theology of preparedness

There is a strain of piety, found in many of our churches and mission organizations, that treats preparation as a failure of faith. “Why plan for what God may not allow?” “Why imagine the worst?” “Don’t we trust the Lord to handle whatever comes?”

These questions sound spiritual. They are profoundly unbiblical.

The same Bible that calls us to trust God also celebrates Joseph for storing grain during the seven fat years for the seven lean years to come. The same Jesus who told His disciples not to worry about tomorrow also told the parable of the ten virgins — five wise, five foolish — and the difference between them was preparation. The faithful steward is precisely the one who has counted the cost, who has built on rock and not sand, who has trimmed the lamp and laid in the oil.

Faith and preparation are not opposites. They are companions. Crisis preparation is not the church’s hedge against God’s absence. It is the church’s offering to a God who gifted it with foresight, intelligence, and the capacity to plan.

That reframe matters in the growth years because growth is precisely the season of “fat years.” It is when the grain is available for storage. The leader who waits for the lean years to begin preparing has misread the story.

Step 1: Identify — imagine the harm in detail

The first step of the 5-Step Plan is Identify. Before you can build a team or write a template, you must know what you are preparing for. Risk assessment is the act of imagining, in detail and without flinching, the specific ways your ministry could be wounded.

Begin with an inventory of what you have that could be damaged or lost:

People — staff, volunteers, members, and especially children and other vulnerable populations.
Property — buildings, vehicles, equipment.
Finances — bank accounts, restricted funds, donor relationships, ongoing income streams.
Data — member records, financial systems, children’s ministry registrations, donor information.
Mission and brand — the reputation of the institution and the credibility of its message.
Relationships — denominational standing, community partnerships, media relationships.

Against each asset, list the realistic threats. Then plot each risk on a simple probability-and-impact matrix. A risk that is highly probable and highly impactful — financial misconduct in a growing organization that still runs on single signatures, for instance — is your top priority. A risk that is improbable but catastrophic — a fire, an active threat — still requires planning, but on a different cadence.

The matrix is not a math exercise. It is a way of forcing leadership to prioritize honestly. And growing organizations, in my experience, have a specific blind spot: they under-rate the risks that come with the very things they are proud of. The new youth program. The new online giving platform. The new building with its new insurance obligations. Growth is where the unassessed risk lives.

The readiness audit

Once you have mapped your risks, ask whether you are ready. Take these ten questions to your board at its next meeting and score yourselves honestly:

Do you have a designated crisis communication spokesperson?
Have you conducted crisis scenario planning in the last twelve months?
Do you have pre-approved holding statement templates?
Is your leadership team trained in media relations?
Do you have an up-to-date stakeholder contact database?
Are your social media accounts secured and access-controlled?
Does your board have a crisis response protocol?
Have you reviewed your legal exposure with counsel in the last year?
Do your staff know whom to contact first if a crisis begins?
Have you identified mandatory reporters and trained them in their obligations?

Most ministries discover they cannot answer “yes” to half of these. That is normal. It is also a starting point. The audit’s purpose is not to grade you. It is to give you a clear set of next actions.

The single most important document your board can produce this year

Compile what you have learned into one page: a Crisis Readiness Profile. The format matters less than the discipline of producing it. It should include your top five to eight risks, ranked; a red-yellow-green readiness score for each; the specific gaps; your priority actions with target dates; and the named owner of each action.

Review it annually. Review it again after any significant change. Keep it in two places — a secure shared drive the crisis team can reach, and a physical copy in the senior leader’s office.

I learned the value of this discipline as Director of Integrated Marketing and Public Relations years ago. We drafted a detailed exercise in which former members of the basketball team, the choir, and the band took to social media to accuse their leaders of misconduct, sparking rumors of a cover-up. By mapping that scenario in advance, we were able to weigh the unintended consequences of our options — whether an awareness campaign would look like a distraction, whether a firm policy statement might invite false claims — before anything had happened. Walking through that dark “what if” prepared us for the realities of digital-age accusations before they materialized.

A worked scenario, even a brief one, is worth ten generic plans. When the crisis arrives, the difference between a team that has rehearsed and one that has not will be evident in the first thirty minutes.

Schedule a ninety-minute board retreat in the next sixty days. Bring the audit. Leave with a draft profile. That is what stewardship looks like in the fat years.

This article draws on Chapter 2 of my book, Crisis, What Crisis? A Guide to Crisis Communication for Churches and Non-Profits. Next in this series: why heroes don’t save institutions in crisis — teams do. The book can be found at: https://books.by/drkenn-dixon

#CrisisCommunication #NonprofitLeadership #RiskManagement #ChurchLeadership #BoardGovernance

Category: Crisis Communications

Heroes Don’t Save Institutions. Teams Do.