While in the midst of a global emergency, the current COVID-19 pandemic, nonprofits are challenged with how to successfully continue managing their mission-driven brand. Going the extra mile to prepare your organization for handling such a feat, will help you and your team better tackle any challenges that arise.

This is an opportunity to align your messaging with what your community needs and/or might be seeking during this time. A crisis is temporary and taking the time to show your nonprofit in a new light by providing specific messaging can instill a sense of trust and value that will be long lasting. It’s important to maintain vigilance in protecting your staff and being an example of a model citizen by not participating in unsafe behavior. Above all else, nonprofits must remain diligent of their brand and visible by its community to ensure they come out of this stronger than before. Here are few objectives for your nonprofit to keep in mind:

• Focus on developing timely content when creating new email campaigns that speak to the crisis at hand
• Creating webinars that speak to the current crisis—webinars perform well and are sought after by those looking for information from organizations they trust
• Creating a survey to push out to your membership—people are eager for information and are looking for results and data on their industry
• Tailoring the tone of your messaging to use more relatable keywords, such as: empathy, community/unity, education, simplicity, reliable, and trustworthy

When it comes to collaboration in times of a crisis, you’ll have to get creative. These strategies shouldn’t complicate your current workflow but rather benefit your organization—having these tools in place will be very beneficial when a crisis is upon us. Taking your staff into consideration and how they’ll continue to operate is vital to prevent interruptions with current business tasks. For example, if your employees are required to work from home for any duration of time, what logistics and tools should you have in place to ensure everything runs smoothly?  Tools such as, GoToMeeting and Slack allow your team to stay connected with one another while still being able to conduct important meetings and to ensure your mission continues to move forward. With the access to technology, it can make it easy to work from anywhere.

In times of a global emergency, having a plan in place to manage your organization, brand and team through the crisis is just as important as the ability to remain flexible and creative.