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Are You Leading Your School’s Culture, Or Is It Leading Your School?

[By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications] David Wolowitz is an attorney with McLane Middleton, a law firm in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  He is also one of the country’s most in-demand experts on sexual misconduct, with a focus on independent schools. We first met David a number of years ago when we served on a panel together.  […]


‘Meth. We’re On It,’ South Dakota Says in Ridiculed Ad Campaign That Cost $449,000

A spectacular fail. From The Washington Post: South Dakota is on meth — at least, that’s the message behind a new anti-drug ad campaign so widely mocked that one marketing expert could only laugh before calling it “a colossal blunder.” The “Meth. We’re On It.” awareness initiative was unveiled Monday by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem […]


Most Keynote Speeches are Disasters. Here are 5 Big Ideas to Save Your Talk, Your Sanity, and Your Career on Stage

From Stephen Denny, managing director, Denny Leinberger Strategy, writing in Inc. Magazine: There’s a lot of advice out there about public speaking, and not all of it is great. Having done keynotes and other high stakes presentations for the past two decades in venues from hotel ballrooms to conference centers, boardrooms, the occasional brewery, movie theater, and college lecture […]


The Case for Crisis Management Teamwork

[By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications]   We are often asked how we interact with a client’s legal team when a crisis strikes an organization. While the traditional view assumes that communications and legal work in constant conflict in the crisis war room, in our experience, these two disciplines can actually complement each other and build […]


Lawyers Should Not Rewrite Crisis Communications

By Bruce Hennes, Hennes Communications Hennes Communications was founded in 1989 as a full-service public relations firm.  In 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we became one of the few firms in North America focused exclusively on crisis management and crisis communications. Since then, we frequently work with attorneys, who tend to be the “first […]


A Crisis is Coming – Is Your Board on Board?

From our esteemed colleague, attorney David Wolowitz: What makes an independent school succeed or fail when crisis strikes? More often than not, the difference hinges on whether the administration and board work collaboratively. The greater the crisis, the greater the stressors on the relationship between the two. Advance planning is critical. A crisis is no […]


Why Auto-Marketing is Another Threat to Effective Crisis Management

By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications Those who know me know that I’m a travel junkie.  Time and budget prevent me from taking all the trips I’d like to take, so I do a fair amount of armchair travel. That includes skimming the daily email feed I get from Conde Nast Traveler – a publication I’ve […]


Crisis Comms 101: How the British Civil Aviation Authority Guided Stakeholders Through Thomas Cook Turbulence

  Thomas Cook was a British travel group company.  On September 23, 2019, Thomas Cook went into compulsory liquidation.  Around 21,000 worldwide employees were left without jobs and 600,000 customers were left abroad, triggering the United Kingdom’s largest peacetime repatriation. Thomas Cook’s corporate collapse last month left authorities with an enormous problem. More than 150,000 holidaymakers […]


A Brief History of Television Interviews – and Why Live TV Helps Those Who Lie and Want to Hide

From Michael J. Socolow, Associate Professor, Communication and Journalism, University of Maine, writing for The Conversation: First, it happened on Fox News. Chris Wallace asked White House adviser Stephen Miller about the president’s decision to use private lawyers “to get information from the Ukrainian government rather than go through … agencies of his government.” Miller’s response began, […]


Crisis Management: Communicating a Sudden Leadership Change

[by Howard Fencl, Hennes Communications] Sexual misconduct allegations cause a company to fire its president. The board of a major nonprofit decides its well-entrenched executive director has been “phoning it in” for the past year and shows her the door. A CEO is dismissed after sowing a pervasive culture of fear that touched off an […]


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