Fending Off An Agenda-Driven Internal Revolt

Our Client

A national non-profit network providing direct aid and support to individuals who have experienced specific types of trauma, as well as state and federal advocacy.

The Issue

A small faction of employees was trying to incite negative media attention about our client in order  to shift the organization’s mission toward the employees’ personal agendas. This small but vocal group recruited a sympathetic reporter from a prominent media outlet and provided the following:

• Fabricated allegations.
• Out-of-context internal communications.
• Libelous claims against the group’s leadership.

Dezenhall was brought in to combat the impending false media report to protect the group’s reputation among its donors, potential hiring pool, and the community the organization supports.

The Challenge

As the preeminent non-profit in its space, the organization has strategically adopted a non-partisan approach to its advocacy work, collaborating with allies from across the entire political spectrum. The client also serves an incredibly diverse population, providing support to anyone crossing their threshold. Despite its unique political positioning, the organization’s employee base skews relatively young, politically and socially engaged, and is supportive of social justice advocacy. The client had to walk a fine line between not alienating their allies while constantly being pushed by a contingent of their employees to be more engaged in social justice issues that fell outside the organization’s focus areas.

This dichotomy between the employees’ personal desires and the organization’s objectives led to an internal revolt by a faction of the organization’s workers. Several employees went to a well-known news outlet with exaggerated, distorted, and, in some cases, fabricated allegations about the organization’s culture and the client’s senior leadership team.

Due to the sensitivities around its work, any story questioning the client’s moral compass would paint the organization as hypocritical, threaten its ability to raise funds, alarm the communities it worked to serve, and damage its ability to hire. Furthermore, the fraction of conspiring employees wisely chose a news organization favorable to their social justice priorities with a history of publishing salacious and unsubstantiated gossip.

The Opportunity

Unlike many claims of hostile work environments, the client had a positive counter narrative to tell and significant supporting documentation to directly refute many of the allegations leveled against senior leadership. Since they had operated in good faith, there was an extensive history documenting their efforts to support their employees while pursuing the organization’s stated objectives.

The Plan

We employed a two-track approach to dismantle the employees’ and reporter’s false claims prior to publication, while we simultaneously engaged defamation counsel to explore our client’s legal options.

We assembled a robust narrative of internal documents and mapped the history of the fractious employee group’s efforts to undermine the organization and its objectives.

After securing a detailed list of questions from the news outlet, we meticulously dissected the accusations line by line, providing critical context to the issues raised and, in many instances, proving them to be blatant falsehoods.

Seeing as the reporter had errored in rushing to print a gossip column, we pursued two strategic lines of communication – engaging our core audiences and stakeholders to correct the record and directly involving the publication’s legal team to pursue extensive corrections to debunk the story.

The dual track proved effective. The organization was able to make sure their top-priority supporters knew the story was defamatory. At the same time, we aggressively went after the outlet and achieved multiple rounds of substantive corrections. Each time we forced the publication to issue a new correction to the story, the client could show key stakeholders that the story was, at best, deeply flawed and, at worst, filled with libelous falsehoods.

The Result

Our initial pushback to the reporter’s questions was so extensive that the publication chose to cut the story on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend. This bought us time to pursue a dual-track approach before the story could inflict real reputational damage. Knowing we had a solid plan with ample proof of the truth, we were also able to fortify the client’s will to fight back.

By the end of the weekend, the first round of corrections was published, holding off any external loss of support and staving off any internal reactions that could have led to a second wave of media.

Over the next two weeks, further corrections were made to the story. These corrections culminated in being multiple paragraphs long, lasting in perpetuity, and raising critical questions about the story’s accuracy to anyone who stumbles across the article in the future.

Despite facing an existential threat to their operations, the client was able to avoid a potential media firestorm. The organization continues to operate as the largest non-profit organization in its field.