Disaster Response - How to Ensure Helping Doesn’t Hurt

When disaster strikes, whether it is from a force of nature or man-made conflict, many companies want to, and have internal and external pressures to, use their resources to help. While corporate assistance can play a critical role in aid and recovery, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure the help is…well, helpful. 

Timing is Everything

In the past, especially pre-COVID and before the increase in distributed hiring, companies often were able to support incidents that occurred close to HQ. Since there has been an uptick in major natural disasters and global conflicts combined with a more distributed workforce, there is a higher demand to respond more frequently, and there may not always be monetary funding available. This leads to increased offers of product donations and pro bono services.

While these offers are important and can play a role in distributing aid or helping people faster, awareness of the complexity of implementation and use of the product as well as the skill sets of volunteers being offered is critical. 

For example, during my time at Salesforce, we responded to a number of crises. It became clear that Slack was a tool that could be enacted quickly and offered immediate benefit. Other Salesforce solutions were also helpful, but more stability was needed before undergoing a new system implementation. 

Thanks to a volunteer-focused culture, we also had volunteers ready to jump into action, and being able to identify who had the skills that were most relevant to the current state of the response was key. Sometimes that meant turning down volunteers, which can be hard but is necessary to avoid adding to the post-disaster chaos. 

Above all else, nonprofits offering services on the ground need to focus on their direct work, and an offer of technology or services in the midst of a crisis can be a distraction at best. In these cases, not helping in the moment is actually the most beneficial. Having an honest understanding of the role that a product can play and evaluating the skills of volunteers is the first responsibility of a company in a crisis response.

Make Sure the Benefit is Mutual

While corporations offer assistance to be good global citizens, there are also other factors at play. Aligning with employee values can be important in hiring and retention. New product use cases or functionality can be discovered during a crisis response. Feel-good marketing stories abound. 

But all of these things need to be done with sensitivity to the nonprofits, government agencies, and individuals that are directly impacted by the situation. 

For example, sharing a marketing story about a nonprofit or government agency using a specific product in response to a war or other conflict can lead to cyber attacks on those systems. 

Awareness of power imbalance when providing money, goods, and services, as well as flexibility on non-critical requests demonstrates that a corporate partner cares about the response outcome more than the ancillary benefits.

Be Prepared

Similar to disaster response, having a corporate disaster response plan before a crisis occurs improves the efficacy of the response. Aligning with senior leadership on when to respond and which levers to pull (money, product, pro bono services), as well as a clear understanding of who is in charge of each of those levers provides internal and external clarity and improved outcomes. Additionally, having guidelines of the terms of each offer and what happens at the end of the term increases trust through transparency.

If your company could use help developing or refining a disaster response strategy, please reach out!