Context and Scenario (AI Generated Scenario for practice only, names and people are not real entities).

Organization to Defend:

StateForward, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on expanding civic participation and improving voter access across your state.

Crisis Situation:

Two days ago, a video clip went viral showing a StateForward community outreach volunteer speaking at a local high school civics event. In the clip, the volunteer appears to criticize a sitting state senator (Sen. Ramirez) over their voting record on election funding and implies that the senator's office "doesn't want young people to vote."

Sen. Ramirez (a high-profile figure up for re-election) has responded publicly, accusing StateForward of engaging in partisan voter manipulation and demanding the organization be investigated for violating its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status by making political statements. A few state media outlets have picked up the controversy, and an op-ed titled “Nonprofits Shouldn’t Be Campaign Machines” is trending.

Your team knows the speaker went off-script and broke the event protocol, but they’re a volunteer, not staff. The outreach manager didn’t catch the comment during the event.

Your Role:

You are the Director of Communications for StateForward. Your executive team has asked you to draft the initial public statement to be released within the next 12 hours.

 Constraints / Pressures (what's known):

• You are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and must avoid any appearance of partisan activity.

• The statement will be reviewed by legal and the board.

• Several legislators (on both sides of the aisle) are watching how you handle this.

• The team that runs high school outreach is demoralized and nervous.

Press Release

To our supporters,

StateForward is deeply committed to our mission of expanding voter access and strengthening civic engagement.

At a local high school event, one of our community outreach volunteers went off script from the approved remarks and has since gone viral online. Our organization has a strict policy against any personal politics involved at any public event we attend. Since the volunteer falls under our responsibility, we are taking this opportunity to expand our public speaking training for all volunteers, focusing on the foundations of non-partisan advocacy.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, we have strict standards we must abide by, being non-partisan is one of them. We understand that our volunteers care deeply about the issues our communities are facing, personal feelings can sweep up even the most experienced speaker in the moment.

To Senator Ramirez and your team: we understand the frustration this incident has caused, and we regret the way it misrepresented our organization’s mission and intentions. We want to reiterate that our goal is to be non-partisan and expand voting access and engagement to everybody. The incident goes against our core values and hurts our overall message.

While we are surprised by the call for investigation, we welcome any inquiry and are fully prepared to demonstrate our compliance with all legal and ethical standards, inviting the opportunity to showcase our commitment to our supporters and community.  

StateForward is committed to our core mission of expanding voter access and strengthening civic engagement and this incident will not sway us from this.

Coletyn Vega-Everdell

Reflection

I had given this scenario and what I had written, about two weeks rest before I came back to review it. 

The first thing I wanted to do was create a short statement. Knowing the limited attention spans the younger generation, and respecting the limited time most people have, creating a short statement that hits on all the points helps keep the readers engaged. 

Addressing both the supporters and the senator directly makes the audience feel as if I'm talking directly to them. Specifically with the section directed at the senator, this kind of tactic can keep viewers engaged as they may feel as if the section isn't supposed to be for them, which piques their curiosity, and for the senator, shows that we are paying attention and listening to what he's saying. I have seen this tactic firsthand when companies or the government address other entities like countries or other companies. News outlets tend to hyper analyze these specific sections as if it was directed at them. 

Another tactic I chose to employ was to take accountability for the action of the one volunteer. Even though this may have been purely the volunteer's fault, I chose to take the blame instead of throwing the volunteer under the bus. This prevents critics from "siding" with the volunteer if they were to be a PR martyr. This shows compassion and that the organization is human, something the audience can relate to. Mentioning that high-emotion topics can get professional public speakers caught up helps alleviate pressure by telling the audience that even they can experience something like this, putting them in the shoes of the volunteer. 

With both the mention of increased foundational training and welcoming any investigation shows the internal steps the organization is planning to take and helps show the audience that the organization is taking real accountability. What seems to be lacking in today's world is accountability, and audiences are literally saying that. Showing that an organization is taking accountability not only verbally, but also within its own actions, shows the audience that the organization is listening and is giving worth to their thoughts. 

Again, with the increased training, this outcome may only be a small increase in workload for the organization, but the message it's sending to the audience has a huge impact. This also prevents the PR nuclear option of outright firing the volunteer, which in some cases helps, but in this scenario, would only hurt the cause as all of the blame has already been pushed onto the organization with the senator's initial tweet. In cases where the blame is already on the organization, firing the employee/volunteer will show that the company is deflecting or passing the blame onto the specific person. 

In other cases, say a c-suite executive does something incriminating, the company firing them would be the best course of action. Showing personal accountability, as well as distancing themselves from criminal activity. In this current case with the volunteer however, firing isn't necessary as that would alienate the audience who may have the same opinion as the volunteer or show that the organization doesn't accept any level of personal opinion. On the flip side, there may be a group of people calling for the termination of the volunteer, and this decision would outrage them. If there's a big enough group that believes in this outcome, a second statement addressing these opinions would be warranted. 

My strategy to address that group calling for the volunteer's termination would take the incident that happened, and create a hypothetical, allowing easier mental visualization for the group to put themselves in the volunteer's shoes. This tends to be a hit and miss strategy, but when dealing with political issues specifically, there's never a perfect solution that appeals to both sides. Putting those critics into the shoes of the volunteer can help. If the opposite incident occurred, say the volunteer endorsed the senator, this incident would still be playing out, just with a different group of opposers. Highlighting this could appeal to those who are less extreme in views. 

Overall, my assessment of the situation pointed out the highly volatile nature of the incident, with one side of the population already against the organization. Utilizing different strategies to calm the emotionally intense audience, then reiterating the non-partisan mission of the organization can help minimalize the damage to the organization. 

August 20, 2024

Starting with the game demo, I came up with the idea behind the game before my class had officially started. Knowing what the class entailed, I spent a lot of time drafting storyboards to come up with an idea that isn't saturated, and followed consumer interests. One key element in this whole process was taking in customer sentiment about certain game design and features, and seeing what other games are doing.

One feature players seem to dislike is microtransactions. While most game companies push out free games with in-game purchases, the overall sentiment is that most players prefer working towards unique and interesting items, rather than opening a loot box, purchasing a reward track, or even outright purchasing cosmetics. I had originally intended the game to not include in-game purchases, but to cost $30. Another sentiment players seem to have is receiving a game worth its price tag. One example of a game not achieving this would be Destiny 2 by Bungie. With each expansion, it seems that players express frustration with the lack of content, even though this extra content costs about as much as another game would. This can cause strife between the players and the game with some customers purchasing the additional content, getting exclusive items that improve their character, while other players who refuse to purchase the content miss out on better equipment. 

August 26, 2024

After attending class for a week and getting the general feel for what's required of me, I began learning Unreal Engine 5 as my engine of choice (we had to pick between a few options). The class wouldn't officially teach UE5 until the last few weeks, so everything had to be self-taught. 

The hard part of coming up with a game idea was done, I just had to learn how to implement it. Starting with character design, I picked up Blender, a free open-source program that allowed me to use hard-surface modeling techniques to create characters, assets, and textures.

October 21, 2024

This marked the halfway point of the semester, I had basic character models completed and animated and started the process of implementing systems and control features.

December 5, 2024

The demo was completed and presented in class. A title screen was implemented along with a settings menu with options to change the game visually. Once the player loaded into the game, they were able to move around, activate the character switching, and use an emote button. 

January 6, 2025

My senior seminar class has started, and we were given directions and guidelines for our cumulative projects. At this point, I was undecided on whether to continue working on the demo, or to create a cinematic to exercise my communication skills. 

January 20, 2025

I had decided to go with a cinematic and had created a rough draft for how the animation will play out. I took this opportunity to silently compete with my classmates, it wasn't entirely a competition, nor was it out of malice. Giving myself certain goals to reach on a self-guided project was a little difficult, mainly because I didn't have a timeline fully realized and I didn't know where I should be progress-wise. 

February 2025

 At this point, I had a script and storyboard of what I wanted, I also had the scenes blocked out to get a general feel for scale, and what shots to implement. I prepared two sets for recording, one of a forest, and one of a town. Two different feeling places gave the animation some depth and layers, whereas having one set would've made the overall story boring and monotone. I had also picked up Adobe Substance Painter 3D as another program to use. This program gave me better insight into the pipeline for texturing and implementing textures across all programs. 

March 2025

My nose was to the grindstone. The days starting from February started to blend together as I worked on the cinematic. While I had other classes that required my attention, this project took not only extra class time, but also my free time as well. A project of this scope typically has a team working 40 hours a week to get this project done, whereas I only had 3 months total to have it completed. By the end of March, the textures were complete, the models and environments were done, the only thing left was to record and edit the scenes.

Totaling 12 separate scenes, some unused, I managed to record each scene in a matter of hours, by far the quickest part of the project. One benefit of using Unreal Engine 5 is the real-time rendering, what you see in the editor is often times what you see through the camera. This circumvented the traditional render time of days to a matter of minutes (something I had shared in my class previously that had helped other students doing similar projects). While this helped my project immensely, this also helped my classmates and the quality of their projects skyrocketed. Going from freshman level animations to attention grabbing technical animations. My one-sided competition had then worked its magic, with other students shooting up in quality, it forced me to meet and exceed their levels. 

April 2025

April marked the last few days of instruction, meaning one last chance to have my work critiqued. At this point, I essentially had a final draft completed (the video above). This draft was well received and had exceeded my previous expectations. While there was a department showcase this same month, I had submitted this project as I completed it, and it was quickly accepted. The overall support for the project was immense, even attracting the attention of a local game company interested in its future progress.