WVU’s MCToday explores unique marcom strategies that will help you inform, persuade and inspire your audiences.
Crisis management expert, consultant, and author Edward Segal talks about the publication of his new book on crisis management — Crisis Ahead: 101 Ways to Prepare for and Bounce Back from Disasters, Scandals, and Other Emergencies (Nicholas Brealey).
A Crisis is sometimes defined as anything that interrupts normal business operations … something Webster says that brings about a turning point or decisive moment when difficult decisions must be made. Many if not most organizations, companies, and leaders understand the need to put a crisis plan in place before the next crisis hits, no matter how unpredictable the actual event might be.
Marketing and communications during a crisis demand flexibility and adaptability. For the West Virginia University Foundation, that was never more apparent than during the height of COVID-19. The Foundation’s IMC team of 4 had to quickly put together two campaigns in less than a month to help raise emergency funding for students hurt by the pandemic.
Advances in behavioral science have come a long way since the discipline’s inception in the late seventies. Robust studies have shown time and again that long-held theories of top-down information dissemination, particularly when scientific in nature, are not only ineffective but perhaps even counter-effective. Ensuring that communications are received as intended, and ultimately acted upon for the purpose of predicting behavioral outcomes, requires understanding how the brain processes information and its cognitive limitations.
30 years ago the marketing landscape looked much different than it does today. The internet wasn’t around, there were limited media options and data took a while to compile, analyze and act upon. Today, marketing moves at the speed of light. There are thousands of ways to reach your audience. Data is readily available, decisions happen instantly, changes to campaigns can be made immediately. That’s the beauty of marketing, it is always changing.
Measuring the return on investment for communications and marketing initiatives is essential across all industries today but how does data-driven decision making differ for non-profits, especially for those operating in the public policy arena?
