How Brands Can Act Responsibly During a Crisis
By cdelprincipe@hubspot.com (Curt del Principe)
It’s been 53 days since Hurricane Helene devastated my hometown of Asheville, but I’m going to level with you: I showered in a FEMA trailer this morning, so it’s still really hard to care about send rates and conversion optimization.
Lucky for you and me (and my editorial calendar), I found a story that I do care about. And my sense of humor is still (mostly) intact.
It’s a story of cleverness and kindness. A story about how one business owner used her clout to help her community. And a story about how your brand can do the same, should you find yourself in the middle of a crisis.
And don’t worry: we’ll also check out examples of how businesses of different sizes chipped in, so there’s plenty for you SMBs and enterprise marketers, too.
Making Magic in a Time of Trouble
Charla Schlueter sits in front of me meticulously shuffling a deck of Magic the Gathering cards. Yet each time the door beside us opens, she greets each newcomer with a smile and their first name.
Schlueter’s the owner and operator of Gamers’ Haunt, a little game shop in Asheville, North Carolina. Since the hurricane hit, my son and I have been visiting weekly in search of something the shop gives away for free: normalcy.
But we’re not actually in Gamers’ Haunt. Not properly. We’re seated in the two-room kung fu studio that’s graciously allowed Schlueter to host a makeshift shop after a maple tree rudely inserted itself into her roof during the hurricane.
Despite the change in venue, the studio is packed wall-to-wall with Schlueter’s regular customers. It’s game night and the turnout is high. They’re here for a bit of normalcy, too, but they’re also here to support Schlueter and her team.
This is the kind of community your social media director would commit crimes to have. It’s fiercely loyal and consistently engaged. And it’s anchored by Schlueter’s unflagging friendliness.
Her friendliness is belied by only two things: The way she absolutely annihilates my 9-year-old kid in Magic. And the shrewdness with which she leverages her business influence to help this community.
A Stormy Surprise
We each draw seven cards and begin trading stories about how the hurricane flipped everything on its head.
“After the storm, I did my best to try to track down as many customers as I could to see how they were doing and make sure that they were good,” Schlueter tells me while arranging her hand.
During one such check-in, she and her crew helped a customer clear wreckage from his flooded home.
“We go to his room, and it’s all covered in mud because the whole house was submerged,” she says. Yet among the silt …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
