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Letter to the Editor
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Getting the Word Out Isn’t the Best Thing Foundations Can Do Now

April 9, 2020

To the Editor:

Forgive the rantings of an old ex-communicator. Passover and Easter are upon us, and I’d prefer not to be excommunicated.

As a longtime Communications Network board member and fervent disciple of Frank Karel, its founder, I’ve been reluctant to second-guess Sean Gibbons’ column (“A Simple, Low-Cost Way for Nonprofits and Foundations to Curb the Coronavirus Crisis,” March 31). Yet Sean’s otherwise good advice about crisis communications — that foundations and nonprofits should listen to, trust, and “get the word out” about expert sources of data and guidance — is not what these organizations should be focusing on or doing much of in this pandemic.

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To the Editor:

Forgive the rantings of an old ex-communicator. Passover and Easter are upon us, and I’d prefer not to be excommunicated.

As a longtime Communications Network board member and fervent disciple of Frank Karel, its founder, I’ve been reluctant to second-guess Sean Gibbons’ column (“A Simple, Low-Cost Way for Nonprofits and Foundations to Curb the Coronavirus Crisis,” March 31). Yet Sean’s otherwise good advice about crisis communications — that foundations and nonprofits should listen to, trust, and “get the word out” about expert sources of data and guidance — is not what these organizations should be focusing on or doing much of in this pandemic.

I know this may sound heretical to my communications colleagues, but the old crisis communications playbook — all hands on deck, with megaphones, bullhorns, and semaphores — simply won’t cut it in a crisis of this magnitude. As hammer-wielding communicators, we need to acknowledge that not every problem requires our nail.

This pandemic, this crisis, in this time, the likes of which we have never seen before, is unique. For years, I have railed against the overuse, misuse, and thus debasement of the words “unique” and “crisis.” We have become almost inured to them, which renders communications about severity, magnitude, and mitigation ever more challenging.

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In an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick just after the 2016 election, Barack Obama said: “I don’t believe in apocalyptic — until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” This pandemic is beyond unique crisis; let’s hope it’s short of apocalypse now.

Yes, in “normal” crises foundations and nonprofits should be considered trusted sources or conduits, or both, of information and guidance from other trusted sources. But when there are too many trusted sources or too many conduits, too many oracles, bullhorns, and megaphones, often competing, even unintentionally, for attention and ear time and head space, you get a way-too-high noise-to-signal ratio. When that happens, people tune out. They may not want to listen and, even if they do, don’t know whom to listen to, whom to trust. We know that from our current politics and from communication theory and practice.

Donald Trump has laid the groundwork for the rapid spread of this horrible pandemic in the United States and the communications nightmare the country is experiencing by denying and denigrating science and evidence, spouting conspiracy theories (saying measles vaccine leads to autism, for instance), and hollowing out and marginalizing the very agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, we’re supposed to trust at any time but especially in a crisis:

CDC: In March, don’t wear masks. In April, wear a mask if you want.

FDA: Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are completely unproven as effective against COVID-19, but let’s try them anyway.

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National Institutes of Health: A vaccine? No, that will be available much sooner than 12 to 18 months. But, remember, I’m not such a big vaccine fan anyway.

Last week, Trump said the United States would be sending thousands of ventilators and other equipment to Europe (where the pandemic has mostly begun to peak); today he’s embargoing all such exports. And that he’d be hoarding ventilators in the national security stockpile for “us” and let the states fend for themselves. That’s DIY federalism run amok.

No, in a democracy, or in an unenlightened dictatorship, this pandemic is the exception that proves the rule. We don’t need foundations and nonprofits to take up time and space and attention getting the word out. Every resource-deployment choice a foundation makes represents an opportunity cost, something else it can’t do. Everything a funder does now needs to be focused on mitigating the devastating effects of this pandemic on the nation’s health and welfare.

Foundations and nonprofits can’t curb the pandemic, but they can help curb its effects and aftermath simply by doing what they do best. They should stick to their knitting, applying what Jim Collins in Good to Great calls their “Hedgehog Principle.”

In other words, foundations providing financial support to their grantees now and the nonprofits they support providing services and support to those who desperately need them. I’m particularly concerned that even implicit advice and direction from funders to their grantees who need immediate support could exacerbate an already-skewed power imbalance between the funder haves and the grantee have-lesses. And if any of us who see the daily entreaties from the organizations we support, and from many we don’t, think this isn’t an ultracompetitive funding environment, we’ve got another think coming. For tens of thousands of nonprofits in the United States, this isn’t simply a fight for funding, it’s a fight for survival for their organizations and those they serve.

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Here’s what foundations can and should do for their grantees right now. Except for No. 5, it won’t cost much:

1. Ask your grantees what they need; don’t tell them what they should do.

2. Convert your short-term, project-based funding into general operating support, and partner with other funders to aggregate and mass capital for immediate deployment.

3. Increase your allowance for overhead. Grantees can’t serve if they can’t keep the lights on.

4. Relax onerous reporting requirements.

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5. Forget the 5 percent payout floor that all too often acts as a ceiling. Don’t worry: If you spend 10 or even 15 percent of your much-depleted endowment for a few years, you’ll probably still survive. Many of your grantees may not; for them, this pandemic is existential. To think you can and should exist in perpetuity is hubris anyway.

Shortly after I succeeded Frank Karel at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, almost 20 years ago, we faced what at the time seemed like a serious financial crisis but now looks like child’s play. Shortly after we had made unusually large long-term commitments to our grantees, our endowment assets dropped by almost a third. The chair of the trustees’ finance committee, Rich Worley, recommended relaxing the 5 percent payout target to enable the foundation to meet those forward commitments. His argument, as I recall it: “Perpetuity is a long time. Does it really matter now if we go out of business in 450 rather than 500 years?”

My advice about foundations not adding more noise to the system isn’t ironclad. Those foundations and nonprofits with a track record of experience and leadership in public health and health care should be sharing, when asked, the right information to the right people at the right time. That means leaders like Rich Besser at the RWJF, Sandra Hernandez at the California Health Care Foundation, and Bob Ross at California Endowment, each a physician with deep expertise in public health, and their counterparts at other funders, have a special responsibility.

But just broadly saying foundations and nonprofits should use their bully pulpit both overstates their influence and fails to recognize that there are plenty of such organizations out there that don’t think or act as we do and that are spewing dangerous untruths. I don’t know much virology, but I doubt whether more, and more benign, viral communications will trump the deadly ones.

To paraphrase the title of Johnny Carson’s first national TV gig, who should you trust? The president? Depends on where he’s moved or hidden the goal posts that day. Tony Fauci? Definitely. The governors of California, Louisiana, Ohio, New York, and Washington State? Yes. The CDC? Maybe, but it has neither a handle on the data nor a great recent track record. This isn’t the inane Zombie Apocalypse. The governors of Florida and Texas? Not so much.

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Finally, as foundations concentrate on meeting immediate needs, they must also help their grantees prepare for a very different future, one in which business as usual certainly won’t cut it.

In 1981, shortly after Ronald Reagan’s OMB director, David Stockman, proposed eliminating the national endowments for the arts and the humanities, the ensuing outcry from the cultural community, including some of Reagan’s Hollywood friends, caused him to appoint a task force to “study the problem” and recommend “solutions” to prepare for a diminished federal role.

When the staff and I considered what we might call the group’s report to the president, we came up with the tagline “Toward a Less Ghastly Future.”

The task-force members didn’t much like that idea, but that’s what foundations and their grantees need to prepare for, I fear, once America heads out of this ghastly pandemic. Amelioration now, preparation next. And soon.

David Morse

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Stavern, Norway

David Morse is a former chief communications officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Atlantic Philanthropies. He also worked as an aide to Sens. Jacob Javits of New York and Robert Stafford of Vermont and as director of President Reagan’s 1981 Task Force on the Arts and Humanities. A second letter from him will appear on Friday, offering his view from Norway, where he now lives.

Read other items in this Covid-19 Coverage: Opinion package.
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