Is this a crisis or just a bad day?

It’s a question often posed by our founder and CEO Kathy Tunheim when receiving calls from distressed clients. It quickly determines what level of communications intervention is necessary, and it gets at the core of the issue: What do people actually think?

Public relations and psychology are inextricably linked from the relationships we build to the ways we solve a problem. During a crisis, our strategies aim to influence what people think, how they feel and what they do in response. It’s difficult to reason with an angry mob so to speak, which makes understanding psychology extremely beneficial for public relations professionals in times of crisis.

Let’s examine the link between crisis communications and psychology and how it determines the proper response.

Anger, Anxiety and Fear, Oh My!

Understanding certain principles of psychology can help us tailor our messages effectively and provides insight into how people respond during a crisis. Emotional responses are often the first ones to kick in. Emotions have strong influences over daily decisions that we make and the activities we engage in.

There are three components of emotion: the subjective experience, the physiological response and the behavioral response. Everybody experiences anger differently; some are quicker to anger or are more hot-tempered than others. That is the subjective aspect.

The physiological response is less relevant to us, but it includes involuntary responses such as a palpitating heart out of fear. Behavioral responses are the way people express their emotions. Some may tweet angrily while others may protest or even threaten legal action.

Effective crisis communicators know how to speak to people experiencing anger, anxiety and fear, and limit the behavioral responses – like angry tweets – that can harm a company’s reputation.

Anger

When someone is experiencing a strong emotion such as anger, an effective communications strategy will validate and empathize with those feelings. The goal is emotional regulation or the ability to control one’s emotions and remain calm. Using empathetic language and active listening strategies, such as statements starting with “We understand…” can make people feel heard.

Typically, people are quick to believe things and slow to change their minds. Psychologists focus on cognitive behavioral therapy for managing anger to identify unhelpful or negative thought patterns and change beliefs. Crisis communicators do just that by acknowledging how people feel and diverting their thoughts over time through transparency and trust building.

Fear

When fear is the emotion that needs to be addressed, one common misconception is that acknowledging risk increases fear. People typically assume the worst in crisis; they naturally expect that there is risk.

That said, it is important to acknowledge uncertainty in any crisis. Fear of the unknown is certainly real, and it is ok to admit you do not have all of the answers. But you are also working as quickly as possible to deliver answers and find the best possible resolution to the issue. It is a way of establishing trust and demonstrating a sincere response.

Anxiety

Manage expectations and anxiety. “Everything is under control,” can come off as overly optimistic considering people often assume the worst. Issues are rarely resolved when you think they might, therefore an ongoing response is almost always better than an expected resolution date.

Larger crises or disasters can cause some to panic (PDF) and take action. It is important in these circumstances to acknowledge people’s desire to be proactive, but explain why some actions may be harmful and redirect them to the most appropriate course of action.

Furthermore, studies show that those not directly affected can see themselves as at risk. One study demonstrated that the more TV news people consumed about the 9/11 terror attacks, the more likely they were to experience symptoms of PTSD. Clearly defining who is at risk and who is not can reassure the wider public of their security and acknowledges the seriousness of the situation without downplaying it.

Getting down to the psychology of the person can help us humanize a crisis. We acknowledge that there are groups that form during a crisis. However, we also recognize every person is different, and we must address multiple emotions at once.

Now that we understand how emotions impact our messaging, what is the science behind the best response?

Shopping for the Best Strategy

There are a few ways to respond depending on the circumstances. Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) outlines four types of responses:

• Rebuilding Strategy – Rebuild relationships with stakeholders by taking responsibility for the crisis and offering apologies or compensation. Use under accidental crises.
• Diminish Strategy – Minimize responsibility placed on the organization by justifying and offering reasons for the company’s actions. Use when not at fault.
• Deny Strategy – Re-assign blame away from the organization by confronting the accuser(s) for invalid accusations, denying existence of a crisis, or blaming another party. Use when faced with rumors that are not true.
• Bolster Strategy – Position the organization as an asset to its stakeholders by reminding them of the organization’s former good deeds and praising them for their loyalty. Use in conjunction with other strategies.

While the correct response will vary with every situation, the Deny Strategy tends to be very unreliable, and psychology has the answer. In the context of COVID-19, the public distrusted mayors who denied the existence of a crisis.

Another study that involved a sunk cruise ship found that consumers favor companies that confess rather than avoid accountability. Logic tells us that there should be adverse consequences to confession. “The transgressor accepts full responsibility, which theoretically increases anger and subsequent punishment, retaliation, and so forth. Yet the converse holds true,” the study quotes. The results showed that consumers’ emotions of anger and sympathy play a mediating role, as most consumers value honesty.

Still another found that people are more empathetic towards companies who use the Rebuilding Strategy as opposed to the Deny Strategy.

In psychology, denial is a defense mechanism in which a person refuses to accept a fact. Depending on the seriousness of the accusations, a company trying to reassign blame may come off as overly defensive even if the rumors are false.

Regardless, every company large or small should have a crisis plan in place so that when a bad day turns into a crisis, they are ready.

Are you experiencing a crisis? Do you need to develop a crisis action and prevention plan? Tunheim’s experts are hardened veterans. Reach out today for crisis consultation.

Do you open every email you receive? Of course you don’t.

You prioritize those you open and you ignore or delete many of the others. Why do you chose to open one email while deleting another? Here are a few email subject line best practices to consider.

The two most important factors that determine whether someone will open an email are:

1. Is the sender of the email known to me?
2. Does the subject line inform me that there is something of interest in the email?

People scan their inboxes just as they scan anything else online. They start by seeing who an email is from and then scan the subject line to determine if there is something in the email that will compel them to open to learn more.

The Sender

You’ll want to consider that dynamic when crafting your email subject lines in order to prompt recipients to dig in and read your message.

• If you are sending an email personally, does your recipient know you?
• If you are sending as an organization, are your recipients familiar with your brand?

If you answered yes, then you’ve successfully jumped the first hurdle.

The Subject Line

What’s in it for your recipients?

What is compelling or valuable enough about your email to your recipients that will prompt them to open it? The only purpose of the subject line is to motivate your recipients to open.

It’s a teaser. Don’t waste it by, for example, using it to brand your newsletter and tell subscribers what issue number it is. Your subscribers know the email is a newsletter because they subscribed to receive it. They don’t need to know the issue number. What they need to know is what’s inside!

Key Messages

There are instances where it will be more important to ensure your key messages have been seen than to necessarily get people to open your email.

While you should think about weaving your primary key message into your subject lines, when responding to a crisis or using email for change communications, you’ll want to lead with your key messages.

The importance of leading with your key message in the subject line becomes even more clear when you consider that even those people who did not open the email will have seen your key message simply by virtue of scanning their inbox.

Avoid language that contradicts your key message in favor of language that supports it.

For example, an apartment complex undergoing renovations are going to at best inconvenience residents and at worst anger them with the disruption to their lives. Email updates about the renovations should:

• Not call it a “construction update”
• But frame it as a “progress update” instead.

For those who open your email, start the body of your email with key messaging. Think about using a a call-out number or statistic to grab the attention of the reader followed by a brief blurb that explains or adds context to that figure by way of illustrating or supporting your key message.

Put bad news in a positive frame.

Continuing with the idea of construction, rather than talking solely about interruptions, frame that disruption with messages about progress to date and highlight the benefits and vision of the future when the renovation is complete.

Consider bolding key messages to harness scanning behavior and include future-focused imagery that reinforces the positive vision of the future rather than reinforcing the disruption and inconvenience of the present.

Need help with your email marketing program? Let’s talk.

If you’d like to take the next steps towards planning for change, Tunheim is here to help. Fill out our contact form to get in touch with members of our change management team.

In addition, you may request a copy of the slides here.

The polarization of people here and in many other places continues to create dysfunction or paralysis in both policy-making and in market behavior: how we vote, whether we wear masks, whether we will enter retail spaces, gyms or sporting events…the list of politicized choices keeps growing.

With hopes that there is a path back to functional governance and predictable markets, it is time to start determining where effective leadership is going to come from, what it might look like or comprise.

Wherever one sits on the spectrum of underlying political viewpoints, there seems to be strong consensus that polarization is destructive to both our culture and our democracy – only true antifa or fascist activists would disagree. So, whether you are a business leader or a community leader, you have a strong stake in protecting a democratically functioning public sector, enabling a healthy, sustainable economic environment. There is a saying: ‘if the only tool you have is a hammer, you see every problem as a nail;’ and so it is that I happen to see the capacity to communicate effectively as an essential element of leadership. What kind of messages – and messengers – have the potential to create the bridges and shared priorities that will need to be built and defined as we move ahead?

And where are those strong leaders, and how are they using their positions of power to support healing where it surely needs to be occurring?  It is a tricky positioning challenge, that must be acknowledged:  every message seems to be heard or viewed through partisan political filters – or through the context of the emerging equity and inclusion priorities being shaped by the experiences of the past months.

Many of us in business – and other sectors other than government – have operated with an intention to steer clear of controversy, certainly including partisan politics and debates about racism. But as one of my BIPOC friends likes to remind me, the reality of healing is that it requires the opportunities to talk about the past. Not to blame, but to understand. I am coming to believe that the same thing is true of our hyper-partisan current existence. How could someone have voted for Donald Trump? Or conversely, how could someone NOT have supported the re-election of the President? Until we can figure out how to have real conversations about those questions, healing seems a pipe dream. And given the stakes for existing political parties in the USA, no one should expect politicians to lead in this necessary work. As another of my friends – this one a prominent elected official – once said: “Anyone who thinks the behavior of elected officials is a ‘leading indicator’ isn’t paying attention. Political decisions get made when the answers are glaringly obvious.”

So I’m back to wondering where that leadership for healing will come from, and I am concluding that it is right in front of us: leaders in business, in community organizations, in academic institutions, in non-partisan elected offices. We need to be role-modelling the behaviors and initiating the conversations that can lead people back into constructive dialogue with an increasingly diverse and ‘woke’ population around us. Differences of opinion will always exist. Re-learning how to respectfully disagree, to graciously move ahead when my opinion doesn’t carry the day, to genuinely care about bringing others along on our collective journey: this is the work ahead of us. And it seems to me those of us in the silent majority (that is, the middle) need to step up. Are you ready and willing to serve?

Arguably one of the most significant casualties over the last four years has been the assault on the essential nature of fact-based truth by those who govern our highest institutions of power. For them, truth is not based in fact; facts are fungible with alternative facts. Hard news is fake – not true – unless it promotes their self-interest. Science is not to be believed as true, even if there is overwhelming provable evidence of its truth. And we have been told not to take what is said literally, but contextually, because the words used to mean something different than its common definition. In other words, truth is what they want us to believe it is and not what the facts determine it to be.

Stephen Colbert calls it “truthiness”; “truth that comes from the gut, not books.” Or as Webster’s defines it, “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts of facts known to be true.”

Facts and truth are related but not interchangeable. Facts can be proven through calculation and are based upon a certainty in the past. As such, facts are inherently true. Truth is far more complicated to define, let alone understand. One’s truth may not always be based in fact but in a belief of a perceived reality. That reality though, while a foundational belief, may not be true. People perceive reality differently based upon their own experiences and in the context of their lives and can legitimately believe their reality to be truth. But that does not make it true. Reality has only one truth and it is based in fact and it is absolute.

There is plenty at stake in the outcome of the upcoming election. In essence we will be deciding what reality we will live in; one of fact-based truth or one that is created from a perception full of grievance, resentment, and inhumanity. If we choose fact-based truth it will be critical that we collectively stand and defend it. Rebuilding trust in our public institutions, including the presidency, is essential to our democratic future.

If not, then the past four years have shown us what governing looks like when facts are not believed, and decisions are made based upon a false reality.

President Abraham Lincoln once said, “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”

The choice for us this election could not be more important.

A little more than eight months ago, I wrote my first blog of the “pandemic period.” Innocently, I contemplated whether navigation through COVID-19 might have the potential to reverse some of the polarization that has become so ingrained in our culture. Might having to sacrifice for others’ safety bring us closer together as Americans—a phenomenon we’ve seen at other challenging times in our national history? As we now anticipate the election of 2020 amid rising infection rates, the knowledge that we have not reacted that way as a people leaves me heavy-hearted. Whatever happens on November 3, millions and millions of us are going to be sad, angry or worse. In the face of so much division – political, racial, economic and ideological – we are in dire need of bridges that enable us to find common ground and shared fate again. Who is going to build them? How do those of us who believe in democracy need to conduct ourselves?

One of the great things about our country, I remind myself, is that we do have elections, and they come around every couple of years. The peaceful transfer of power is (and should be) one of our proudest public accomplishments. I remember having the opportunity to be in Washington D.C. on the day that Bill Clinton succeeded George H.W. Bush after a bruising campaign. My strongest memory of that inauguration day: thousands and thousands of Clinton supporters on the Mall to celebrate, but stopping to look up and wave a collective, genuine ‘thank you’ to President and Mrs. Bush as the presidential helicopter flew away from the White House. Partisans campaign, someone wins, and someone loses.  But we come together as Americans – at least that has been most of our history. I’ve been moderately involved in politics for more than 40 years, and I must say it has never felt quite like this.  I’m not prone to panic or hyperbole, but I also don’t want to ignore persistent signals that this time is different – and we each need to be prepared to be part of pulling this country back together, ensuring an effective democracy for the generations that come after us.

So, bridge-building: How to even begin? Well, I live on a river and one thing that I have learned over the years is that you always wish there was a closer bridge when you need to get to the other side. So, having lots of bridges, rather than a few giant, expensive and regulated ones is probably the first consideration I’d suggest. Translation: we don’t need to wait for some national organization to propose bridges, we just need to start recognizing the situations where we can help build—and do it. Reconnecting in our workplaces, our communities, our neighborhoods with others who probably voted differently than I did. Stimulating those nerve-endings and memories of common interests, common stories. If I can build from my side, and they can build from theirs, we can meet in the middle: we’ve built a bridge.

Beyond the re-discovery of common stories and interests, a critical part of the bridge-building ahead is securing a road to common facts. Between the politization of so many ‘news outlets,’ and the explosion of information from opaque online sites, we are hopelessly adrift in a sea of information that is consumed through the filters of our biases, our preferences, our comfort zones. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts,” is a line attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democratic U.S. Senator from New York. But it is also acknowledged as a derivation of a quote from James Schlesinger, a Republican who served as Secretary of Defense under both Nixon and Ford. There was a time, not so long ago, when we had a bipartisan agreement that facts are facts, not malleable content to be used as a weapon. How to find a bridge to that foundational common ground?

We have so much potential for a great future, America. Start building bridges.