Activist campaigns aimed at companies are becoming more commonplace than even a few years ago, as activists use direct pressure tactics in order to force changes in business, community, or labor practices. Other protests, aimed at broader political change, also have an impact on organizations as they disrupt the supply chain, the workforce, or even emergency services.

In this episode, Bryghtpath Principal & CEO Bryan Strawser and Senior Consultant Jen Otremba talk about preparing and responding to protest situations.

Topics discussed include planning & preparedness, using a “radar screen” or command center to help detect early warning signs of a protest, working with crisis communications, and responding to a protest situation in-progress.

 

Episode Transcript

Bryan Strawser:                   About three weeks ago there was a pretty major criminal trial that came to a verdict here in Minnesota. The trial was, which we’re not really going to get into the trial, it’s not relevant to the conversation, where a police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of manslaughter in the shooting death of an African American motorist, Philando Castile, in a suburb of the Twin Cities not far from both where I live and where our office is located. This episode’s not about the trial, because we don’t to politics here, but there was an aftermath to the trial in addition to just the personal anguish of all the people that were involved. There was a number of protests that were spawned immediately that led to some pretty significant disruption in the Twin Cities.

Now, we should say at the onset of this, these protests were not violent. There were no injuries that I’m aware of. There was no property damage, so it wasn’t like a riot, but there was definitely a lot of tension. The protesters, in this case, wound up marching onto Interstate 94, which is the major east-west thoroughfare that connect Minneapolis and St. Paul, and it’s a major interstate that goes through the whole state, and they blocked traffic for about three and half hours. Pretty significant traffic disruption while there were a couple of major events going on.

What we want to talk about is not the politics of the trial or the protests, but it’s about this idea of protests and how it creates disruptions to business. What gets disrupted here Jen when you’ve got this kind of thing that’s going on?

Jen Otremba:                        We came from a company that dealt a lot of the times with protest activity for various reasons, and I think a lot of it had to do with the proximity to the courthouse that our headquarters was located in.

Bryan Strawser:                   You should point out we were in an urban environment, and we had a major thoroughfare, a very popular pedestrian thoroughfare, that ran in front of the building. Thus, we had protest, whether related to us or not, came up.

Jen Otremba:                        Yeah. They weren’t always related to us. Also, they ran through. We live in Minneapolis, so we have a skyway system. A lot of the protests go up into the skyway system, and it causes a lot of disruption. Basically, it does a lot of things. One, it disrupts people’s ability to get to work, to and from work, from either their vehicle or from home to get into the doors of your building. It causes that issue. It can potentially scare people trying to get into work. It, in general, just causes all kinds of disruption while you’re trying to do business. It’s a distraction.