Episode 252: Being Ready for When Bad or Inaccurate Info Hits Social Media
It's another beautiful day right here on this edition of around with Randall. We jump into an area that I may not be the world's greatest expert at, but I think the conversation today and the ability for me, me, for me to guide some thoughts are probably really appropriate because I think about this more in a process way, in a organizational reputational way, rather than the detailed way.
And what we're talking about is what happens when on the ever present Omni knowing world of social media, something bad is said about your nonprofit. Why is this a problem? What can you do? And really breaking it down into organizations that obviously have assets and human talent that can deal with this to smaller nonprofits, where maybe there's not as much human talent or human opportunity because we're smaller, we're doing more things.
How do smaller organizations deal with this as well? We'll start at the top, break our way kind of down towards the tactical, and we'll start with the bigger conversation around why is this so important? What are some of the applications and reasons things to be concerned about? Now, I had to go look this up because there could be bad things being said about me on social media right now, and I would have no clue because I've got no social media.
I'm more of the hey, pick up the phone and call me or text me. So I don't know what people are saying about me, and part of me really doesn't care. Although I probably should based on what I'm going to tell you right now. There have been several studies around the way in which negative bad information is shared, and frankly, I found some of this to be somewhat disconcerting to say the least.
Really, the first landmark study in how the world communicates using social media, particularly with bad news, was a 2018 study done by the publication science. And what it found was is that false news, rumors, innuendos are.
More critical in terms of how the speed and the impact of what they transverse their particular networks. So if we use Twitter, as science did in 2018, as an example, is the study discovered that falsehoods and inaccuracies were 70% more likely to be retweeted and will reach a group of, let's say, 1500 people that are connected in some way, shape or form in this social network world, six times faster than positive news.
And that while the world of bots is something that we are all trying to figure out and deal with what's accurate, what's real, what's not, what the study found was that even though there were bots at the time, and obviously a lot more now, that it wasn't the bots that were actually sharing the negative information bots share, just information in general, but it was what they found.
Humans that were doing more often of the negative information. Part of this, they believe, is a psychological kind of driver or rationale that the false news is more novel and surprising and more emotional, and so people share it.
In 2023, a Yale study found that in the research using Facebook in this particular case, that only 15%, the top 15% of users of Facebook, were sharing 37% of the actual negative or falsehoods on that platform. I mean, that's a very small group driving a lot of content. And that in this case, with this Yale study, it wasn't so much that the algorithms were driving it as that people were seeing and taking it in more likely and sharing it more likely.
So in some ways, it mirrors that 2018 study by science and MIT study found that social media users would share negative headlines more often than not, about a 35% increase. Or they could say it's worse when the is a negative connotation, which, as we've discussed, maybe not true. We also are hearing that in the recent, past year, over the last year with Covid, that a 2024 study found that health information of an organization or a person is more like 82% of the people are more likely to share that than anything else.
So when it's incredibly detrimental or problematic for a person and or an organization, also that from a 2024 study in England, 90 plus percent of the population has been intersected or been intercepting negative misinformation online. Why do I put all this out there? A lot of stats to start the podcast, and for that I apologize. But the reason why is, is that it's going to happen to everybody.
There are going to be falsehoods and things said. And our organizations, which are truly built on the concept of trust, frankly, the fact that we are tax deductible and tax free don't have to file taxes or pay taxes. While our ten, our, our, files at the 90’s but are all based on trust. Everything we do is trust.
And so if that trust is going to be broken and things go faster on the internet, faster on social media, they're more likely to be shared. We've got to be more prepared for this. And frankly, I tend to think we're not. Much of the tactical is about prep. You can handle most of this if you just think about it a little bit.
So let's give you three quick examples of where this might happen. Number one, maybe the food bank that mistakenly is accused online of selling its donated food, which wasn't true. Another examples, maybe a nonprofit theater company is misrepresented online or on social media about closing due to management, but frankly, they're planning renovations.
The third is that all of a sudden a hospital or a universities cutting programmatic or something in the organization, which may or probably is not true. These are three examples which can happen instantaneously.
There are costs when this happens. Before we jump into the tackle the heart of how to avoid this, we have to understand what the outcomes are when it does happen. Number one is reputational damage. And that's back to that. Trust that once it begins to erode rebuilding it, that credibility that it takes to raise money to build those relationships with the people who believe in you, it takes time.
It's not going to happen instantaneously. We need to be aware that as the world condenses, as I think about it, or shrinks based upon the speed and the accuracy. Sometimes not. Not at all. But certainly the prevalence of social media and electronic communication. The world is shrinking. More people are going to know. And if we have reputational damage, that hurts our ability to do what we're supposed to do in the community through our missions, making the world a better place.
Number two is donor hesitation. If you have a lot of bad stories, you have donors who say, well, I'm not going to put money into something that's either going to fail so they perceive or it's going to be cut or it's going to be changed, or even if it's not true. I think about this often with my children.
How do you get them to verify facts? We do this academically with a 12 and eight year old. Verification is pretty loose at this point, but the point or the or the exercise I'm always asking is how do you know that's true? But the problem is, I don't think most people do that. I think they just take on face value.
Well, that has to be true. It's on the internet internally. Number three is, is this hurt staff morale? If they believe things, there's going to be a problem. You might have a sense of demoralization that occurs that maybe they look to do other things because they don't know so, or they just are not very efficient or effective or positive with people you need them to be.
So if you're not prepared for these moments, your staff internally probably isn't as positive or engaged as we want them to be. The final thing is, is that if we don't prepare, we're left really trying to solve 4 or 5 six things at once, rather than just executing plans that maybe prepped a little bit. The reason why that's important is the last one is this this is operational disruption to you.
In a smaller nonprofit, you have fewer people doing more things that are very important to maybe the day to day operations of the organization, the functionality of it, and all of a sudden, if you're not planning this out or thinking about it in a strategic way, that you then get the whole staff trying to, you know, put out a fire instead of just kick the smoldering twigs away, do it quickly, do it effectively.
But all of a sudden, everybody panics and you don't get anything done. So not only is there morale, there's maybe operational disruption to what you're supposed to be doing, whether it's the reputational damage, donor hesitation, staff morale or operational disruption. The problem we have is, is we got to deal with this because if we don't, what ends up happening is with chaos.
And so what are the things that we can do to be prepared? What are the steps that we can take to be ready for all of this? So let's start right at the top, the tactical ways. And there are, I believe six that I've identified. The first is, is that you have to be able to know that it's happening.
So the perfect contrarian to this is me. You don't ping me because I don't have social media at Facebook. But people saying, you know, I'm an idiot, which actually may be more factual than, not true, but not positive. I wouldn't know about it. And so the first thing is, is you've got to find ways of making sure that you are in the know when it does happen.
How do you do this? Well, several things. Number one is you start with your people that are the closest. Do you have staff monitoring social media in general for your organizational names? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram in those places? Secondly, are you doing the same with your boards when they come on the board, do you say, please make sure that this organization is one of your favorites, that you're connected to it so they see the feeds as well.
So if you have your board in your staff and maybe you pick a few key donors or people you're going to enlarge, and very quickly your network of knowledge about exactly what is going on in terms of social media. Number two is there are free tools out there. The best one is Google Alerts, where you literally can have Google monitor the internet or Google searches for the nonprofits name leaders names programs so that you get an alert when something comes up that may actually be a good thing.
If you're marketing department or marketing efforts, don't include this to begin with. This is a wonderful thing for you to hear good things about your organization, but in this case, it could also help you alert you to some of the bad. The other thing is, is that your staff can do regular checks of Facebook in terms of maybe the groups or the community pages.
Certainly the same thing could be done with Twitter. All this is to say is you've got to create a process where you have regular interaction with the people that are closest to you. Staff, board, maybe a key volunteer or two who can check this stuff or be connected to it as a part of who they their social network or out there in the world, or the internet world, their connections.
If you're a small nonprofit, I promised that I wouldn't just do this with a staff, you know, or an organization with a staff of 50 people, is is there a way to create a ten minute task per week to do the searches and rotated around the team? Everybody you've got this got the first week of the month. Just want you to do a quick search on Facebook, Twitter or the Hulu, whatever and figure out exactly what's being said about us so it doesn't have to be in one person.
It can be done across multiple people if we set up the right tasks. So the first thing is, is to be engaged, to know and have ears on the ground that this stuff can happen. Number two is to be able to respond what I would think of as quickly, but more importantly, calmly. Yes, speed matters, but tone matters more.
So a defensive emotional response to things is generally when things go off the rails. One of the reasons I don't like Twitter and Instagram, trust me, I'm not saying it's bad or evil. I'm saying I'm not good with it. Is is that I have opinions now, over time, and with a little age and little experience, I've learned to temper those inside my head.
But I know myself well enough that not a lot happens in the world where I don't have an opinion. Well, I'm not sure every opinion is a good one. And frankly, first, reactions to things sometimes aren't the most accurate. So why am I pushing this into my context? I understand this, so I've learned that's probably just a plus.
I'm not that interested not to have a Twitter account to respond to things right away. Frankly, I'm not sure anybody really cares what I think anyway. I can't get to people in my own house to care, but if you reach out back into a social community online and a social network and it's negative or defensive or emotional based upon somebody rumor, somebody's innuendo, somebody's commentary, the person that's going to look bad is you.
So you still have to respond, but you have to be ways, and there have to be ways in which you do this in a respectful, meaningful, appropriate manner. So how do you do this? Well, this is a good rule for both small nonprofits and maybe even bigger ones. How about a couple of templates that are ready to go?
Thank you for your concern. Maybe it's an email or an outreach or direct messaging. Here are the facts.
Remember in all of this is that you can build what I would call decision trees or communication trees in Prep. So maybe there's emails that you have this message. Thanks. Here's what we're doing. You can have boards that are ready to comment. And frankly we want to this goes back to other things that I've said on different podcast.
We have an emergency. We don't want everybody commenting. So we're quoting the executive director, the CEO, the president. If you're large enough, maybe you have a media designee. But the point is, is that one person. But we want everyone to have the ability to quote that person. So it may be someone on the board who says, thanks for your concern.
Let me give you the facts. According to our executive director, she's saying, or he's saying X, Y, and Z. Well, some of that tree who it goes to, how often it goes to, whether it's, this platform on Instagram or that platform on Twitter, we're going to various things that are prepped.
And that in doing so, all we do is slide in the information and know where it goes and how to get it out of just what we need in that moment. So it's framed, but the picture is not quite there. And while we do slide that picture in with the details, usually quoting or referring to one person who becomes kind of the outreach coordinator, or if you're picking up their media liaison.
Number three is the idea of transparency and proof that openness undercuts information. I've seen too many times where there is a rumor or a story that comes out more often. In my case, it's news media of, you know, kind of more traditional. And you, you read it, you go, I wonder what's going on. And then it's 24 to 36 hours for someone from the organization.
Comments. My world is most often related to sports because that's what I tend to watch. But this is true of everywhere. And you after like a couple of hours, you want to say, look, I'm an idiot. I'll speak for myself. When it comes to social media and to the idea of how the internet promulgates all this information. I mean, I understand it, but I don't like it.
I would have responded 15 seconds to AB or had a response 15 seconds after it happened. If you're not quick and transparent, then what happens is as people start making up their own stories, it's a whole and they start commenting. So your ability to be transparent and prove or show the data, the credible information that reduces the false claims, reduces the, the kind of the less room for error for growth of that particular non story or maybe even negative story, unproven story, not true story.
How do nonprofits do this? Well first it's back to that prep. What information and infographics can be incredibly powerful. Show world the value of what you do. And are you updating that once or twice a year so you have something ready to go to show value? That slip in that we talked about a few moments ago, that picture, without having all the details you can add very quickly, but that framework becomes important.
So having some value, here's what we do and why it's important. And infographics are great. Then as a part of that, what are some brief updates. Quick things, strong financial position, number of people served, the tenure of the amazing leadership. As long as that's not part of the bad rumor. Plain language that can be updated very quick on a website or out in a newsletter electronically and or out in the social media world.
And it's proof. It's data. It's not. We do good things in the community. It's we help this many families specificity in this case actually becomes important because you want to dissuade any of the other things that may come up if you're not able to show it's just not an opinion. So data and facts, transparency and proof all come together.
And having the right response. The fourth is being ready to engage. And this ties a little bit back on to responding quickly in prep. Who are the people you want this information to go out to? Loyal supporters and staff internally are the two most important, and I think one's more important the other. I'm just saying those are the first two I think of.
You have to create the messaging to your donors, which we just talked about, that it's probably more transparent and proof of value speaks to the facts and the details as to what's happening. And that's both internal and with you would use that internally but with internal. It also messaging either kind of hidden or direct organization is doing fine.
We're moving forward. We're okay. You're okay I'm okay. We're okay. This basic summary of either its finances or its programmatic outcomes, or whatever it is, is looking to calm the waters and the idea of bringing this more reasonably into that transparency and proof. It's critical. But if you don't engage your community, then what you end up with is them making their own commentary.
So the last thing in this idea of engaging communities, make sure you have the right lists. Can you produce a list of cell phones, email addresses, of Twitter accounts, Instagram accounts, and whatever else that would allow your organization to quickly access people that you want to have? The truth number four engage your community. Number five is have some type of what I would call crisis protocols.
Is there a misinformation playbook that might include things we've talked about? Who monitors and flags, by the way, all of these things can be prepped in small organizations. You don't need a media team to do this. And by the way, you're going to make better decisions when you're calm and not in the moment. That's why sometimes it's better to have this stuff pre-written.
So who's monitoring this, this playbook? Who decides who's going to respond? We're not guessing or picking somebody randomly. Who's going to give responses, create clarification statements, or decide we're going to go silent having these saved statements or templates or the framework that you can slide other information off, speeds up the response and instead it only then maybe needs a few hours, which we were talking about a few minutes ago, where I'm always amazed.
Like what? How do they not how are they not prepared to have some commentary? Not 15 seconds. But as it becomes more known, they get out there. This protocol becomes important. It saves days of stress in a crisis, if you have a playbook ready to go, the last is the idea of educating internally. Really, we're talking about staff, volunteers, and I would maybe allocate that to the board.
I have seen when these things happen that there's a lot of well-meaning staff and volunteers who, by what they say publicly or what they do, actually escalate the misinformation in ways that hurt us even more. So you should be having staff training, talking about their role in communication, direct, indirect, and maybe in the moment you want to bring that staff together and say, you know, in this particular case where there's misinformation or negative things out there, we don't want to respond directly.
We need to make sure you're caught that are key contacts, that executive director, board representative, someone who's pre identified to be the representative to our world as we kind of close a lot of what I would call unofficial communication, messaging and connections down. You need to refer them to here. And these are what we say internally and externally.
What I would think of as talking points. We want to create that messages are clear, that things are very consistent, and that it doesn't require a great deal of time to do this because we've prepped it. So educate internally. So everybody's on the same page, knows what they can and can't say, and more often can't than can. And where they can refer that particular person they're dealing with or hearing from, or being asked where they can get information from the organization.
These are the six. So think about the tactical detailed solutions that include number one monitor. Be out there in the world. Hear what's going on, have connections using your board, staff and other things like Google or so. Number two is be able to respond quickly and calmly. That tone matters. What you say is maybe even more important than how fast you say it, as long as it's not too long.
Number three is transparency and proof. Be open and ready to talk about the value of the organization that contradicts possibly what's being said. Number four is to engage in the community, have people lists, names, email addresses, Twitter accounts ready to go. Five is have a crisis protocol. We're going to plan all this ahead. Who says what, when and how?
It's usually going to be one person who's that designee and are we using kind of what I would think of as a mis information or negative information playbook? And the last one is to educate internally, make sure people know what their role is and what can mechanic MP set. All these can be handled by a media department. But if you're a small nonprofit, you can do all of these very quickly, very easily, and you will make better decisions if you're not being pressed with stress.
Nonprofits can and can't ignore the possibility. And maybe actually, actually, in this moment occurring, misinformation got to be ready for it. And be proactive when it comes to monitoring and giving out clear, transparent information. That really is the truth. Don't wait until the crisis hits to do this. Build your systems, your protocol, your processes now to protect the reputation when it happens.
And it's going to happen to all of us. It's the game of telephone. If we want to make it as simple as possible, what message was started when it comes all the way around, the circle isn't going to be the same and people are going to spread, as the data says, more negative, more incorrect. It turns out much of the time, information that hinders our ability to do our job prep.
Be ready. Think about these six things that allow you to be more engaged and ready to serve as a leader when crisis occurs and or misinformation is shared. Don't forget to check out the blogs at how a philanthropy two per week things I see and read. 90 seconds apiece. More and more people reading them because I can kind of see a little bit of traffic information that's how it philanthropy, backslash blogs.
And if you'd like to reach out to me, it's Podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. Can't express how important you are in your community. It is incredibly disconcerting when rumors and negative commentary, and most importantly, inaccurate commentary is made about our nonprofits and what they do in the community. There are certainly examples where it was deserved, but it's still unfortunate.
The key here is, is that your understanding and value as a leader, whether you are the executive board member or a staff member, you can bring this up, which elevates your engagement with your profession, with your job, with your responsibilities, and with the people in your office, and certainly with the mission of the nonprofit in which you serve.
That brings me to my favorite all time saying some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wonder what happened. Today's episode is about you being proactive and being someone who makes things happen for the moment when everybody's going to wonder, what in the world happened here? The other thing is, is that, as I always say, that what you do every day in the nonprofit world makes a difference and helps change lives.
And so realize that something like today's information is another way for you to contribute and feel really good about what you do for your nonprofit. And if it's nothing more than just ask the question, heard this crazy guy talk about this. That's how I want everyone to feel like they're making a contribution. They're someone who makes things happen, and in doing so, you go to bed every night, look in the mirror just before you do, and say, I did something good today.
That's what I want. Those of us in the nonprofit world philanthropy World board member, staff member, consultant, donor, whomever to feel like they made a difference today. Because when they do, they make their community a better place. I'll look forward to seeing you the next time, right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall.
Don’t forget make it a great day.