CASE STUDY

Determined: Turning a Health Crisis into a Scholarship Movement

How a personal challenge became a participatory platform for health education and student opportunity

Dr. Kenn Dixon, LSSGB, APR
Founder and organizer of Determined Cycling

AT A GLANCE

2015	6	Thousands	> $1.5M
First organized tour	Tours completed by 2022	Miles ridden for education	Updated endowment outcome

Public milestones documented through 2022 | Updated endowment outcome supplied for this case study

Executive Summary

Determined began with a physical limitation and became a platform for student opportunity. Military injuries had narrowed the exercise options available to me. After a health scare, cycling offered a practical way to rebuild strength. In 2015, that personal response became an organized ride from Dallas to San Antonio for the Seventh-day Adventist Church General Conference Session. By 2022, I had personally organized six tours, ridden thousands of miles, and helped raise more than $150,000 toward an education endowment.

The larger outcome was not a ride or even a campaign total. Determined created a way for people to participate in a shared mission. Cyclists trained and raised support. Schools adopted riders and followed their progress. Students welcomed them with rallies, banners, and lessons connected to the tour. Donors funded access to education. Sponsors and volunteers supplied resources. Satellite tracking let families, students, and organizers follow the journey while adding a layer of safety in areas without reliable cell coverage.

The initiative later exceeded its original $1.5 million goal, according to the updated campaign outcome provided for this case study. That result matters. But the deeper lesson is how they achieved it: they translated a private challenge into a public purpose, then designed it so many people could see themselves in the work. Determined demonstrates that a durable movement grows when a clear cause, a visible challenge, meaningful participation, sound operations, and measurable progress reinforce one another.

The Strategic Question

How can a personal health challenge become a credible, repeatable movement that mobilizes people around educational access? Determined answered that question by connecting two needs that might otherwise have remained separate: adults needed a compelling way to pursue health and community, while students needed financial pathways into Seventh-day Adventist education.

The Challenge Behind the Challenge

The visible challenge was physical. Injuries from my military service limited the kinds of exercise I could sustain. A later health scare made inaction a poor option. Cycling offered lower impact exercise, but simply buying a bicycle would not have created a movement. The strategic challenge was to give the activity a purpose larger than personal recovery.

Education provided that purpose because the issue was both personal and institutional. My own educational journey was uneven. I didn’t appreciate every opportunity when I was young, and financial constraints interrupted my time at Oakwood. Later, as a teacher, chaplain, youth pastor, education evangelist, and parent, I came to understand both the value of Christian education and the sacrifices families make to obtain it. That history gave the campaign emotional truth. I was not raising money for an abstract program. I was riding for students whose choices could be constrained by cost.

The Reframe

The breakthrough was to stop treating cycling as the end and use it as the organizing vehicle. The first tour, then called Tour de Youth, linked a demanding ride with a timely destination and a cause people already cared about. The name later evolved into Determined Cycling, but the core promise remained simple: we cycle for our health, and we ride for their future.

The Journey from Event to Movement

Stage	What happened	Why it mattered
Constraint	Military injuries and a health scare narrowed viable exercise options.	The effort began with a genuine problem, giving the story credibility and urgency.
Personal response	Cycling became a workable path back to physical activity.	A visible discipline replaced a private intention and made progress observable.
2015 launch	A group rode from Dallas to San Antonio during the General Conference Session.	A personal practice became a shared challenge connected to a larger gathering.
Expansion	The group organized tours for educational causes, including two fundraisers associated with Oakwood University.	The model proved portable across institutions and communities.
2022 milestone	Six organized tours, thousands of miles, and more than $150,000 raised were publicly documented.	Repeated execution demonstrated that the work was a platform, not a one-time stunt.
Endowment scale	The campaign pursued a $1.5 million Texas Conference education endowment and later exceeded that amount.	A finite event contributed to a long-term funding mechanism for student access.

Each stage reduced a different barrier. The original ride gave the idea visibility. Repetition created credibility. Institutional alignment connected the ride to a durable purpose. The endowment gave donors a long horizon. School and student participation made the mission tangible, and technology made the experience safer and easier to share.

How Participation Was Designed

Many fundraising events ask people to watch, applaud, and donate. Determined gave stakeholders distinct roles. That shift from audience to participant was the movement-building mechanism.

Participant	Role in the movement	Value created
Cyclists	Train, ride, fundraise, model healthy behavior, and represent an assigned school.	Courage, visibility, peer invitation, and a human face for the cause.
Schools	Welcome riders, organize rallies, communicate with families, and connect classrooms to the route.	Local ownership and repeated touchpoints beyond a single event day.
Students	Track riders, create signs, attend greetings, and learn through tour-related activities.	The beneficiaries become active participants rather than distant symbols.
Donors	Support riders, sponsor the campaign, and contribute to the endowment.	Personal connection to a visible effort and a lasting education outcome.
Volunteers	Support logistics, meals, lodging, communications, and route operations.	Capacity and community hospitality across a multi-day tour.
Technology partners	Provide GPS visibility, satellite communication, and emergency capability.	Safer operations plus a shared digital window into the journey.

Technology as Both Safety and Story

A multi-day cycling tour creates operational risk. Riders may travel several hundred miles, cross state lines, cover as many as 120 miles in a day, and pass through areas without dependable cellular service. For Determined, tracking could not be a novelty. It had to support real decisions.

Organizers used lightweight SPOT Trace devices mounted to bicycles, along with the SPOT My Globalstar mapping platform. The system provided near-real-time location visibility for organizers and a shareable view for students, sponsors, and supporters. SPOT X two-way satellite messengers added communication and SOS capability outside cellular coverage.

That technology served two strategic purposes at once. Operationally, it helped organizers know where riders were and offered an emergency communication option. Relationally, it allowed supporters to follow the route, anticipate arrivals, and greet cyclists with pep rallies, banners, and signs. The map turned distance into a shared experience. People who could not ride could still participate.

Preparedness Builds Trust

My Marine training shaped the approach. Long-distance cycling requires optimism, but it also requires redundancy, visibility, and preparation for the moment no one wants. As I explained in the Globalstar case study, the hope is never to use the SOS function; its value is knowing the connection is there if needed. Safety did more than protect the riders. It signaled that the campaign respected its participants and took stewardship seriously.

The Education Loop

The most distinctive element of Determined was how the ride entered schools’ lives. Riders were assigned to schools. Children and sponsors could follow their progress. Schools organized welcomes. Some classrooms incorporated the tour into curriculum by studying comparable events such as the Tour de France.

This created a reinforcing loop. The ride gave teachers a live subject. Classroom attention gave students a reason to follow. Student enthusiasm energized riders and donors. The riders brought the campaign back into communities. Those interactions generated stories, photos, conversation, and new invitations to participate. The fundraiser became an educational experience, and the educational experience strengthened the fundraiser.

Why the Model Worked

Authenticity. The origin story was true, specific, and connected to a recognizable need.

Mission alignment. Health, education, service, and faith were expressed through one visible act.

Narrative structure. A demanding journey created natural milestones, anticipation, and story tension.

Multiple entry points. People could ride, give, volunteer, host, teach, track, welcome, or sponsor.

Shared visibility. GPS tracking made progress observable and linked distant participants to the road.

Institutional durability. The endowment converted short-term energy into long-term educational capacity.

Results and Meaning

By May 2022, the public record documented six personally organized tours, thousands of miles ridden, and more than $150,000 raised during the two Texas Conference tours then completed. The campaign was working toward a $1.5 million endowment intended to provide scholarships for students who wanted a Christian education but needed additional financial help. The updated outcome supplied for this case study places the fund above $1.5 million.

The financial outcome is significant, but dollars alone understate the return. Determined also produced a network of relationships, a repeated event platform, a health witness, classroom engagement, sponsor value, volunteer experience, and a body of stories that made the cause visible. Those are not substitutes for money; they are the participation assets that helped money move.

The Determined Movement Model

The experience can be translated into a practical sequence for leaders who want to turn a personal challenge into a public cause.

1 Start with a real constraint
Name the lived problem honestly. Credibility begins before the campaign language.

2 Connect it to a mission
Link the personal response to an outcome that matters beyond the founder.

3 Create a visible challenge
Choose an action with milestones people can follow and a finish that means something.

4 Give stakeholders roles
Design meaningful ways to ride, give, host, teach, track, volunteer, and welcome.

5 Build for safety and trust
Treat logistics, communication, risk planning, and transparency as part of the message.

6 Convert attention into an asset
Use the event to build a fund, curriculum, relationships, and repeatable infrastructure.

7 Measure movement
Track both money raised and the people, behaviors, partnerships, and student outcomes created.

What Leaders Should Measure

A movement should not be evaluated by activity alone. A useful scorecard separates what the campaign produces from what changes because people participated.

Level	Examples	Management question
Inputs	Riders, volunteers, routes, school partners, sponsors, communications, safety resources	Did we assemble the capacity to execute responsibly?
Engagement	Miles, donations, tracking views, rally attendance, classroom participation, inquiries	Did people interact with the campaign in meaningful ways?
Outcomes	Endowment growth, scholarship access, repeat donors, returning riders, new partnerships, health behavior	Did participation create durable change for students and the community?

Leadership Lessons

Determined taught me that purpose becomes powerful when people can enter it. A founder may carry the original burden, but a movement grows only when the mission is no longer organized around the founder alone. The cyclist matters. The child holding the sign matters. The teacher turning the route into a lesson matters. The donor, volunteer, sponsor, driver, host, and safety partner all need to see how their action advances the same outcome.

It also taught me that technology works best when it strengthens a human relationship. The tracking map was valuable because it helped organizers protect people and helped students feel close to the riders. The device did not create the movement. It made participation safer, more visible, and easier to share.

Finally, Determined showed that a temporary event can serve a permanent purpose. The wheels stopped at the end of each tour, but the endowment was designed to keep working. That is the strategic move: use the urgency of a moment to build an asset that outlives the moment.

Conclusion

Determined did not begin as a master plan to raise more than $1.5 million. It began with the need to respond to injury and a warning about health. Cycling created a path forward. Education gave that path meaning. Participation gave it scale. Safety and tracking technology helped people trust and follow the journey. Repetition turned an event into a platform, and the endowment turned a platform into lasting capacity.

That is the central case: personal adversity can become public value when leaders connect an authentic story to a clear mission, design meaningful roles for others, and build a structure capable of carrying the energy beyond a single event. The strongest movements do more than ask people to support a cause. They help people become part of it.

Source Notes

Texas Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. The Cycling Pastor. May 4, 2022. Documents the 2015 launch, six tours, thousands of miles, more than $150,000 raised through two Texas Conference tours, and the stated $1.5 million endowment goal.

Globalstar. Marathon Cyclists Choose SPOT for Tracking and Safety. Documents school assignments, curriculum engagement, route conditions, SPOT Trace tracking, the shared mapping platform, SPOT X satellite communication, and SOS capability.

Updated campaign outcome. The statement that the education endowment surpassed $1.5 million was supplied by Kenn Dixon in the September 2026 case study brief. It is presented here as an updated project figure and is not attributed to the 2022 public profile.

October 3, 2026October 3, 2026

Heroes Don’t Save Institutions. Teams Do.

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

September 11, 2026

Preparation Is Stewardship, Not Faithlessness

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

September 11, 2026September 11, 2026

We Never Thought This Could Happen Here

“The sentence I have heard in nearly every crisis briefing — and why the smallest, newest organizations say it most.”

It is always uttered with sincerity. And it is always wrong. It would be more honest to say, “We never wanted to think this could happen here.” The two are not the same.

I want to speak directly to leaders of young organizations — the church plant in its third year, the non-profit that just got its first grant, the school that just opened its doors, the ministry that is still one founder and a handful of volunteers. You are the leaders most likely to believe you are immune. And you are the leaders least able to afford the belief.

The illusion of immunity

The illusion of immunity is not a minor leadership blind spot. It is a structural sin of organizations — a kind of quiet pride that wraps itself in the language of faith. We say “God is in control” and use it to avoid the discomfort of imagining how things might go wrong. We confuse a doctrine of providence with a strategy of denial.

We forget that Joseph stored grain through seven fat years not because he doubted the dream God had given Pharaoh, but because he believed it.

Founding-stage organizations carry a specific version of this illusion. It sounds like: We’re too small to be a target. We all know each other. Nobody’s watching us. We’ll build the systems when we’re bigger.

Every one of those sentences is a vulnerability wearing the costume of humility.

Why small is not safe

The statistical reality is unsentimental. In any given year, somewhere in the church world, a pastor will face an allegation. A treasurer will be found to have falsified accounts. A child will be injured at a youth event. A laptop with member data will be stolen. A sermon clip will go viral and be quoted by media that has never set foot in the building. These events are not anomalies. They are the texture of institutional life in a fallen world.

And small organizations are not exempt from that texture. They are exposed to it in particular ways:

The trust-based culture that lowers financial controls. A young organization with one signature on the checking account and a treasurer everyone loves is the textbook setting for financial misconduct — not because the people are bad, but because the structure invites it.
The volunteer workforce that complicates background checks. When everyone is a volunteer and everyone is a friend, the awkward conversation about screening gets postponed.
The children’s programming that increases liability exposure long before there is a policy manual to govern it.
The donor dependency that magnifies any reputational hit. A young organization with twelve major donors can be undone by the loss of three.

For a business, trust is one currency among several. For a church or a non-profit, trust is the whole currency. People come because they believe — at some level not always articulated — that this is a place where what is said is true, where what is given is used as promised, and where what is vulnerable is protected. Every crisis is an assault on that triad. And a young organization has not yet built the reserves of trust that let an older institution survive one.

What a crisis actually is

Let me define the term, because founders sometimes hear “crisis” and picture something that only happens to institutions with legal departments.

A crisis is any event that threatens the mission, reputation, safety, or legal standing of an organization and that cannot be managed by normal operational rhythms. Most days, most ministries are managing incidents — disruptions, complaints, controversies — that an attentive leader and a competent team can absorb. A crisis occurs when the organization’s normal absorptive capacity is overwhelmed.

Notice what that definition implies. The smaller your absorptive capacity, the lower your crisis threshold. An incident that a large denomination shrugs off can be existential for a church plant. Small organizations do not face fewer crises. They face crises sooner.

The one thing to do this year

I am not asking a founding-stage leader to build a full crisis communication plan in year one. I am asking for one thing: settle the prior question.

Before any leader learns the techniques of crisis response — the holding statement, the media training, the social media protocol — they must settle this: Are we willing to tell the truth at cost?

Every effort to protect an institution by concealing what should be told accelerates the destruction of the institution. The cover-up is always more damaging than the crisis. That is not a public relations observation. It is a spiritual one. “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” was not said about epistemology. It was said about the bondage of accumulated falsehood — the kind that grows in organizations that decided, early and quietly, that reputation mattered more than honesty.

Founders set culture. The decisions you make in the first three years about what gets disclosed, what gets discussed at the board table, and what gets handled “quietly” will still be shaping the organization thirty years from now, long after you are gone. The first crisis communication competency is not media training. It is the willingness, formed long before the storm, to tell the truth at cost.

Ask your leadership team to write one paragraph this week in answer to a single question: What is the difference between protecting our reputation and telling the truth? Discuss the answers at your next meeting. You will learn more about your organization’s future from that conversation than from any risk assessment.

The crisis is not a question of if. Only of when. Prepare anyway.

This article draws on the Introduction and Chapter 1 of my book, Crisis, What Crisis? A Guide to Crisis Communication for Churches and Non-Profits — Book One of a trilogy on crisis leadership for mission-driven organizations. Next in this series: why preparation is stewardship, not faithlessness. To get a copy of the book: https://books.by/drkenn-dixon

#CrisisCommunication #NonprofitLeadership #ChurchLeadership #Stewardship #CrisisManagement

August 30, 2026

The Mission Alignment Accelerator™: Turning Mission into Leadership Behavior

Dr. Kenn Dixon, APR

Every organization has two missions: the mission it proclaims and the mission people experience. When those missions diverge, a Mission Credibility Gap™ emerges. Employees begin to question leadership. Stakeholders lose confidence. Donors may reconsider their commitment. Culture weakens, and strategic execution becomes harder.

The Mission Alignment Accelerator™ is The Dixon Group’s flagship advisory engagement for leadership teams ready to close that gap. It moves organizations beyond mission language and into measurable leadership consistency.

The engagement follows eight integrated components:

Executive discovery to identify the organization’s mission credibility hypothesis.
Employee and stakeholder listening to surface hidden inconsistencies and institutional blind spots.
A Mission Alignment Index™ baseline scorecard to establish a practical starting point for measurement.
A Leadership Mission Consistency Framework™ workshop focused on three pillars:

Decision Alignment: Are decisions made through clear mission criteria?
Accountability Alignment: Are leaders evaluated on mission outcomes?
Resource Alignment: Do budgets and investments reflect mission priorities?

Alignment redesign to strengthen decision-making, accountability, and resource allocation.
Ninety-day (90) leadership behavior commitments that convert insight into visible action.
A measurement dashboard and progress review to track movement and reinforce accountability.
Sustainment and advisory support to embed consistency beyond the initial engagement.

The goal is not a better mission statement. It is a leadership system in which actions, decisions, accountability, and resources consistently support the mission.

The result: stronger employee trust, greater stakeholder confidence, deeper donor commitment, improved organizational alignment, and more disciplined execution.

What is the distance between the mission your leaders proclaim and the mission your people experience?

Closing that distance begins with leadership behavior.

#LeadershipCredibility #MissionAlignment #ExecutiveLeadership #OrganizationalCulture #NonprofitLeadership

July 31, 2026July 31, 2026

I Thought I Knew Public Relations—Then I Started My APR Journey

Kenn Dixon, PhD., APR

Before I began my journey toward Accreditation in Public Relations, I was a tactician.

If leadership asked for a video, I created a video. If they needed a social media post, I drafted one. If there was an announcement, campaign, or event to promote, I got to work. I took pride in being responsive, creative, and dependable.

But I did not always ask the questions that should come before the work.

Why are we doing this? Who are we trying to reach? What do they need from us? What outcome are we trying to achieve? And how will we know whether it worked?

Too often, success was measured by a few likes, positive comments, or the feeling that we had “gotten the word out.” At the time, that felt sufficient. Looking back, I can see that I was focused on outputs rather than outcomes. I was producing communication, but I was not always practicing public relations strategically.

Then, a seasoned APR professional, Patti Conwell, APR, challenged me to pursue accreditation. My first reaction was not gratitude. It was anger.

I believed I already knew how to be a strategic thought partner to leadership. I had experience, good instincts, and a deep commitment to my organization. Her suggestion felt like a critique of my capabilities. But beneath that challenge was a deeper question: Did I know public relations as well as I possibly could at that point in my career?

That question stayed with me. Eventually, it became the beginning of my APR journey.

As I started the process, I discovered that APR was not about dismissing the experience I already had. It was about giving that experience a stronger framework. It opened a new way of thinking and challenged assumptions I did not even realize I was making.

I began to understand that public relations is not simply creating a message and pushing it out (tactician). It is a disciplined process of research, planning, implementation, and evaluation (RPIE). It means understanding the organization’s goals and objectives before deciding which tactics will support them. It means identifying the right audiences, listening deliberately, setting measurable objectives, and evaluating whether the work made a difference.

That process strengthened my ability to offer trusted counsel.

It helped me move from being someone asked to “make something” to someone who could respectfully push back and ask why. Why is this our goal? Why is this our audience? Why is this the right approach? What evidence supports this decision? What will success look like? Those questions do not make a communicator feel difficult. They make a communicator strategic.

APR also changed how I viewed audiences. They were no longer simply groups to communicate to or targets for a message. They were people, individuals with perspectives, concerns, experiences, and needs. My responsibility was not merely to reach them. It was to listen to them, learn from them, and build relationships grounded in trust.

That distinction matters. Public relations cannot be a one-way monologue. It must be a two-way conversation. We have to make room for feedback, even when it is uncomfortable. We have to understand what people are telling us, not just what we hope they hear from us. And we have to recognize that meaningful communication is built through relationship, not just reach.

Pursuing APR also required vulnerability. To build an effective strategic plan, I had to ask leaders and stakeholders to trust me with their candor—their concerns, priorities, and sometimes difficult realities. That kind of strategic work requires strong relationships and the credibility to be in the room when decisions are being made.

It also requires leadership to believe that you can help advance the organization’s goals while protecting the organization and its leaders when it matters most. That trust is not automatically given because someone has a communications title. It is earned through preparation, sound judgment, listening, integrity, and the willingness to provide honest counsel.

Life before APR was not a failure. It was an important part of my professional foundation. But life after APR is more intentional. I now approach public relations with a deeper understanding of strategy, measurement, ethics, relationships, and responsibility.

APR did not erase my experience or tell me I was not capable. It gave my experience a stronger framework, a sharper purpose, and the confidence to ask better questions.

If you are curious about what a more intentional, strategic, and relationship-centered practice of public relations could look like, let that curiosity lead you. You do not need to have every answer before you begin the APR journey. You simply have to be willing to grow.

#APR # PRSA #PublicRelations #YouGotThis

January 2, 2026January 4, 2026

When the APR Becomes Hollow: Living Up to the Letters We Earned

By: Kenn Dixon, M.A., CDMP, APR

The Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) is supposed to represent more than professional achievement; it’s a public promise. Those three letters say we’ve embraced a higher standard: that we’ll ground our counsel in research, think strategically, act ethically, and lead with integrity. Yet too many practitioners earn the credential, frame the certificate, and then carry on exactly as before, still reacting instead of planning, still mistaking output for outcome.

That failure is more than disappointing; it’s dangerous. When someone who holds the APR ignores its principles, they weaken the very trust they were trained to build. Executives don’t need cheerleaders; they need strategic counselors who can clarify complexity, weigh risks, and tell hard truths. When an “accredited” professional offers advice without evidence, data, or reflection, they betray not only their organization’s confidence but also the credibility of every communicator who truly practices the craft.

Strategic thinking is not a style; it’s a discipline. The APR process teaches us to slow down, ask questions, analyze stakeholders, and measure what matters. Abandoning those steps because “we already know what works” is professional arrogance disguised as experience. It tells leadership that public relations is decoration, not direction. And that’s how reputations crumble; slowly, from the inside.

The truth is, accreditation doesn’t make us experts. It calls us to become better experts, continually. To live up to the standards we pledged to uphold means using those principles when it’s inconvenient, when the room is tense, when it would be easier to say what people want to hear.

Those three letters only matter if they shape our daily work, our counsel, and our courage. The APR isn’t a finish line; it’s a vow. If we stop living by its values, then all we’ve earned is another frame on the wall, and the quiet erosion of trust that follows.