How to Harness Anger with Preparation and Automation: Five Things to do Right Now

How to Harness Anger with Preparation and Automation: Five Things to do Right Now

Conference presentation, delivered by Reilly Hay, Email Marketing Manager at Partners In Health

Partners In Health is an international medical and social justice organization that delivers high-quality health care to millions of people in extremely poor and rural areas and uses its experience to advocate for global policy change. In recent months, the organization experienced a major surge in fundraising, advocacy, and acquisition activity in response to threats to global health funding. In one month, Partners In Health acquired more activists than it had throughout all of 2024, raised approximately $1.9 million, saw its two most popular social media campaigns ever, and facilitated approximately 20,000 emails to Congress. That success was made possible in part by preparation that had taken place over the previous 18 months.

When events overtake our plans—whether because of a natural disaster, political catastrophe, or even unexpected good news—the first question organizations usually ask is, Should we respond publicly? But there are many more questions that need to be answered before you can actually go to market: Who decides whether we respond? What should we say? What information should the public know? Are we fundraising? Are we asking supporters to advocate? Who writes the content? Who approves it? What does our audience need? How will we acquire people, and what will we do with them afterward?

If it takes ten days to answer all of those questions and launch the perfect campaign, you can end up with the worst of both worlds: all the disruption and work of responding to the crisis, without the acquisition, fundraising, advocacy, or engagement benefits. The problem is the delay between when information becomes available and when an organization actually begins to respond. That delay comes largely from uncertainty—uncertainty about what is happening, whose responsibility it is, and what each person should do.

Build Your Welcome Series Now

The first thing you can do during calm periods is build your welcome series. This is an area where HubSpot can be especially useful because you can build a sophisticated welcome series now, then clone and adapt it when an emergency happens.

Two things often happen with nonprofit emergency marketing: acquisition is huge, and retention is terrible. You see great numbers during the crisis and then wonder where all those supporters went a year later. A strong welcome series helps steward the relationship between the donor or activist and the organization after that initial moment. It can introduce people to the broader work you do and improve retention. Don't try to build that sophisticated automation during an emergency. Build it now, including the branching logic you might need for recurring donors, one-time donors, non-donors, location, and other characteristics.

The goal is to be sophisticated in the template and simple in the tweaks. Producing new content in response to an event will always require research, drafting, approvals, and execution. Save that effort for the assets you're actually putting into the market, rather than spending it rebuilding the background systems that steward the people you've acquired. For a recent disaster response, we cloned our existing welcome series and changed four words in the first sentence to acknowledge the specific event. We then had the next couple of weeks to refine the later messages as we learned more.

Get Leadership Buy-In Now

The biggest asset for clarity in a crisis is leadership. When leaders can answer major questions quickly and activate teams clearly, they set the tone for a strong emergency response. If you're not in a leadership role, you can still manage up by getting leaders to agree to the decisions you'll need in advance and socializing those agreements across the organization.

One of the most important things leaders can provide during a crisis is what I think of as an “oh” moment: a clear signal that the organization has entered a state of exception. The priority has changed, normal work is temporarily different, and everyone understands that they are activating around the emergency. You can't fully practice crisis leadership without a crisis, but you can create names for the decisions and actions you will need and use those names during regular operations. At Partners In Health, for example, we use terms such as the fundraising go/no-go decision, the designation decision, and the messaging tone decision. That shorthand makes it much easier to communicate quickly when the pressure is on.

Approval processes should also be defined in advance, and they should be linear. A linear approval process has an end: someone signs off, and the work is done. During an emergency, you don't want an asset circulating through an endless loop of subject-matter edits and executive revisions.

We currently use three different approval modes depending on the situation. Full approval means the final product goes to the CEO or other senior leader before it is sent; this is appropriate when precision and risk management matter more than speed. Pre-approved messaging approval means the core messaging is approved in advance and the team is trusted to build and execute within those boundaries. Dead-hand approval means the final approver receives the material and, if there is no response within an agreed period, the team has permission to send. We didn't introduce that last model during an emergency—we tested it during a regular campaign so we could develop the trust necessary to use it when speed really matters.

Know Your Roles

One of the most important elements of an activation strategy is knowing exactly who is responsible for what. Think about CPR: you don't say, “Someone call 911,” because everyone may assume someone else has done it. You point to a person and say, “You call 911.” Emergency communications need the same clarity.

Normally, nonprofit teams like to work in sequence. Someone writes the messaging, gets it approved, then email copy is written, the landing page is developed, graphics are created, and social content follows. It's efficient and pleasant, but it can also be painfully slow. In an emergency, teams need to work in parallel. That may mean developing several versions of landing page copy before the final messaging is settled, beginning graphic design before email copy is complete, or starting a donation page before the final fundraising decision has been made.

Working in parallel is messy. It requires a greater tolerance for uncertainty and for work that may ultimately be discarded. That's why teams need extreme clarity about what each person should do once an emergency is activated. For example, a designer might know that their next step after the activation meeting is to create four fundraising graphic templates while waiting for final copy. You should also identify tasks that don't have an obvious owner and assign them in advance. In a crisis, decisions often need clear ownership rather than a consensus process: someone needs to be responsible for making the call and moving the work forward.

Decide What to Deprioritize

Nonprofits are chronically understaffed and underfunded, and teams often describe prioritization as a list in which everything is labeled “must do.” An emergency requires something different: people need explicit permission to drop some balls so they can catch the ones the crisis is throwing at them.

At Partners In Health, we think about work in terms of what needs to happen now, soon, and later. The “now” category includes the things that become less valuable with every passing minute: the first social post, the first call to action, initial emails, press outreach, photo curation, graphic production, and gathering information that isn't already available publicly. The first response needs to move quickly, but that doesn't mean everything needs to happen immediately.

The soon category is the second wave. One of the biggest mistakes a team can make is sending the first email, then spending the next day watching the results while failing to prepare the second and third communications. You need to think about the follow-up while the first wave is underway. This is also when you can begin producing higher-value content, such as a direct-to-camera video, additional advertising, direct mail, or other materials that make sense once you understand whether the crisis will be short-lived or ongoing.

The later category is everything else: regularly scheduled programming, medium-term projects, routine project management, and documentation. Those things can wait. During a crisis, the priority is speed, not having perfect documentation or knowing the precise conversion rate of every page. If a donation page is working and people are responding to it, that's enough information to keep moving while the situation develops.

Practice With Your Team

Emergencies are rare and high-pressure, which makes them a recipe for friction. The gold standard for emergency preparedness is a detailed playbook followed by a war game—a simulated emergency where the team practices the response. If you have the time and resources to do that, you should. But most nonprofits don't, so there are other ways to build the same structural clarity and trust.

Use your regular campaigns to practice the way you would respond during an emergency. At Partners In Health, the communications and advocacy teams had a difficult working relationship, so we created several planned campaigns that intentionally brought the teams together. We ran email and social campaigns while also coordinating advocacy activity, gradually building trust and familiarity across the teams. Over the course of 2024, those campaigns included several successful advocacy efforts and the organization's largest Hill Day for tuberculosis to that point. More importantly, we had practiced working together across organizational silos before we actually needed to do it in an emergency.

A credible emergency response often requires an organization to act across its entire mission at once. Fundraising needs to happen, policy change may be needed, awareness needs to grow, and supporters may need to be mobilized. In normal operations, those activities often live in separate departments because coordinating everyone is difficult. Practicing an emergency-style response during regular campaigns can build the relationships and habits needed to work across those boundaries.

This approach isn't necessarily the most efficient way to run a normal campaign. You're deliberately introducing extra coordination and asking teams to work in ways that may take more time. But the practice builds important capabilities. Include an acquisition element and a welcome series even if only a small number of people come into it. Track the people you acquire. Bring other teams into the process even if their participation makes the campaign slower. The point is to build the muscle and trust you'll need later.

Build Redundancy Without Losing Ownership

Emergencies happen when people are unavailable, too. People get sick, take vacations, or, as Reilly joked, get married and go on their honeymoons. Every mission-critical task should have at least two people trained to take it over. If you're a two-person team, both people need to know how to do everything that is essential to the operation.

Synthetic emergency responses are a useful opportunity for cross-training. You can deliberately remove one person from a campaign and see whether the team can execute without them. But cross-training doesn't mean that three people should own the same task. Multiple people should be capable of doing the work, but each task should still have one clear owner during normal operations. That avoids the “somebody call 911” problem. Capability matters, but clarity of responsibility matters too.

Audience Q&A

How do you balance speed with approvals and leadership review?

The important work happens before the emergency. If leaders want to review materials, they need to commit to doing it quickly when the moment comes. It also helps to clarify the role of each reviewer: a subject-matter expert should identify substantive accuracy issues, while a CEO or senior leader should focus on major reputational concerns rather than line-editing copy. You also need to choose your battles. If you already know someone will want to change every apostrophe or contraction, establish expectations around that before the crisis rather than trying to solve the problem in the middle of one.

It's also important to build a culture where teams understand that mistakes can happen when you're moving quickly. If something inaccurate makes it into a social post, correct it transparently rather than allowing fear of imperfection to prevent the organization from acting. Making a correction can actually build trust because it demonstrates accountability.

How do you make sure everyone understands that an emergency response has begun?

The initial activation meeting is critical. The goal is to take people out of their regularly scheduled work and make it clear that they're now in crisis-response mode. People need to understand the urgency and be ready to focus. If someone can't attend, their manager plays an important role in communicating that urgency and making sure the person understands what has changed. Meeting summaries and Slack channels can support that communication, but a simple bullet-point recap doesn't always convey the urgency of a live activation. Sometimes you need to communicate with more energy because the situation itself is dramatic.

How do you create action and engagement without relying entirely on polished communications?

Online communities and communication channels should serve a purpose rather than become an end in themselves. A Slack community, for example, is a means to building a stronger volunteer core, not the ultimate goal. In moments of crisis, people can be galvanized by being treated as insiders—giving them a glimpse behind the curtain, sharing what is happening in real time, and giving them something concrete they can do.

The tone matters. Messages don't necessarily need to sound polished or corporate. A direct message that feels like one coworker telling another, “Did you see this? This is awful. Here's something you can do right now,” can be more motivating than a carefully sanitized announcement. Providing people with an opportunity to take action—even if that action is only tangentially related to the central crisis—can help turn despair into engagement.

Closing

The best emergency communications systems aren't built during emergencies. They're built when things are calm, through clear leadership decisions, sophisticated automation, defined roles, streamlined approvals, intentional prioritization, cross-functional practice, and redundancy. When the crisis arrives, the goal isn't to invent a new way of working; it's to activate systems and relationships you've already built.

This transcript has been lightly edited using AI for clarity and readability, with timestamps, filler language, audience participation, and transcript artifacts removed while preserving the speaker's examples, terminology, and key points.