Disasters, whether natural or manmade, often occur with little warning. Just hours after the start of wildfires, hurricanes, and war, frontline groups are on the ground to save lives. And their communications teams are under tight timelines to spread the word about how they’re helping—and how they need public support—to rally attention and action.
These groups include World Central Kitchen (WCK) and Watch Duty. World Central Kitchen, founded in 2010 by chef José Andrés, is a nonprofit that has provided more than 600 million meals to victims of natural disasters, wars, and humanitarian crises. Watch Duty is a nonprofit app that provides real-time wildfire maps and alerts to more than 16 million people across the U.S.
For their communications teams, the challenge is spreading the word about their impact through campaigns that balance urgency and authenticity, while also building trust among existing and potential new donors. To effectively meet this challenge, these groups use cutting-edge pre-testing technology, powered by AI-driven insights, to validate purpose-driven content that drives action among target audiences.
At SXSW 2026, Linda Roth, Chief Communications and Strategy Officer at World Central Kitchen, and Liz Caselli-Mechael, Chief Communications Officer at Watch Duty, spoke with Swayable CEO and Founder James Slezak about the power of creative pre-testing to guide campaign decisions under immense pressure. Scroll for a breakdown of key insights that panelists have gained through consistent campaign message testing.
Crisis communications doesn’t have the luxury of a year-long creative cycle. Watch Duty and World Central Kitchen have built their content strategies around real-time, human-centered storytelling—spontaneous interviews, iPhone footage, and community voices—finding this approach more resonant with audiences than heavily produced and polished campaigns.
“Polished and perfect is not the production environment that is the most credible and trusted for audiences anymore,” said Caselli-Mechael. “We don't have the time to do that when there's a fire or an earthquake anyway, so we’re leaning into the fact that a less polished production approach is resonant.”
Roth echoed this sentiment, highlighting World Central Kitchen’s ethos of “acting now” and ensuring its communication approaches reflect that urgency.
“When we head off somewhere for a new activation, we'll update our website within an hour and post a video the minute we hit the ground. It really is that urgency of now, working like a journalist, to report what’s happening,” said Roth. “But it’s also important for communities to tell their own stories in the way they want to be represented. We don't want to swoop in with the same recipe for everybody.”
The broader marketing world is catching up to this strategy. The rise of creator investment by brands reflects a growing recognition that audiences trust realness and authenticity over production value, which these organizations have practiced out of necessity.
Both organizations use message testing as a tool to communicate their mission more effectively, with clear guardrails around what's off-limits, regardless of what data suggests. Exploitative disaster imagery is one firm boundary for Watch Duty. When testing reveals that a core message isn't landing, the response is improved communication versus jumping to themes that could overstep that boundary.
“You can find trending videos of fires tearing through people's homes, which loses the reality that there is a person on the other side of that home. You’re not treating their experience with empathy,” said Caselli-Mechael. “We have a really important boundary where we want to lean into the testing, we want to lean into the data and see what's effective. But there's also a really important way that your content shows your values and who you are beyond how the audience responds to it.”
Slezak expanded on this strategy, noting that the most effective way for frontline groups to test and use data is within the boundaries of their mission and values.
“If you've got guardrails and values and you test consistently with that [in mind], it's not a question of testing to replace your values,” said Slezak. “It's a question of, within the given guardrails, have you found the most effective way to share a message.”
Creative testing has enabled Watch Duty and World Central Kitchen to learn that some of the biggest gains in fundraising and adoption don’t come from people already primed to give. They come from people who have never seen themselves represented in the work before. Earning their confidence takes sustained effort over time rather than a single, well-targeted ad.
"When an organization gets explosive growth, it's not from likely donors, it's from unlikely donors,” said Liz. “It's from people who never saw themselves reflected in a nonprofit, who didn't trust the work a nonprofit was doing, who didn't believe their dollar could have an impact—and you've changed their mind."
For both organizations, this means looking beyond standard conversion metrics to focusing on trust—asking whether new audiences are effectively reached by their messages, and whether those messages are leading them on a longer journey with the organization. According to the panelists, this is where thoughtful message testing becomes incredibly valuable, surfacing insights into lift and mobilization that engagement metrics alone cannot provide.
For advocacy organizations, one of the most important communications lessons from the panel is building a consistent practice of rapid testing and learning over time. Validating that an organization’s values are communicated clearly through content and positively impact new and unlikely audiences requires ongoing measurement.
"We work in so many different cultures. All of the content has to fit into those cultures and be appropriate, just like our food,” said Roth. “This is where the testing we did with Swayable has helped. We did some message testing with our Middle East audience. ‘Dignity’ was the top message theme that resonated. This went along perfectly with our content, which focused on that value anyway.”
Slezak reiterated that rapid, creative pre-testing is vital to generate evidence that audiences not only respond positively to a message, but are willing to further an organization’s mission.
"Without good evidence, decades go past before the next step in this type of storytelling takes place. The provocative question we had as technologists and scientists was: could we take that one decade-long progression and find a way to make it one day?” said Slezak. “In other words, could we get evidence conclusive enough to say that the story you're considering doesn't work by tomorrow—not in 10 years after an entire society fails to adapt to a serious ecological crisis.”
For advocacy organizations, the takeaways are clear: build testing into the creative process from the start, use it to understand what's moving new audiences, and focus measurement on trust and audience growth rather than conversions alone.
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