Nonprofits and mission-driven organizations spend a lot of energy managing how they’re perceived: crafting the right messaging, anticipating criticism, staying ahead of anything that might complicate the story they’re trying to tell. So it’s worth pausing on a case where doing almost none of that helped an organization turn a potential problem into a PR win and an opportunity to improve their visibility in a positive way.
In 2020, a visitor left the New Bedford Whaling Museum a one-star Google review with three pointed words, “worst aquarium ever.” The museum has no aquarium and never has. What it does have are whale skeletons, including those of a 66-foot blue whale, a 49-foot North Atlantic right whale, and a 48-foot sperm whale, along with one of the largest ship models in the world and a significant scrimshaw collection. It is a museum about the history of whaling, not a place to see fish, which is exactly what made the review a whale of a misunderstanding, which is exactly what made it funny to staff from the start.
For years, this comment stayed an inside joke, what CEO Amanda McMullen recently described to WBUR as staff folklore. Then last November, visitor experience manager Emily Roznoy saw a barbecue restaurant selling shirts that highlighted one of its bad reviews and she had an idea. Roznoy pitched putting the museum’s one-star review on a T-shirt, paired with a whale skeleton on the front. Staff signed off immediately. The new merchandise sold steadily for months as a quiet in-house favorite. Then this summer, a TikTok video caught on, a regional CBS affiliate WPRI picked up the story, and CBS Evening News ran a national segment. The museum took 738 online T-shirt orders in one afternoon, sales rose 250% in a week, and orders came in from 49 states. Only Idaho sat this one out.
What makes this more than a fun local story is what the museum didn’t do. It never issued a clarification explaining that it’s a history museum, not an aquarium. It never quietly buried the review in the hopes no one would find it. It saw the humor in the situation, put the criticism on a shirt and let the punchline do the correcting as anyone buying it already understands the joke. Owning the criticism and showing they have a sense of humor communicated more credibly than any rebuttal could have.
There’s also a lesson here about recognizing the right moment, the right opportunity, and the right channel when they arrive. The review sat as an internal joke for years, useless as a PR tool until someone recognized what it could become. The shirt itself sold quietly for close to a year, a modest product with a built-in audience but no wider reach, until a TikTok video found it the right channel, and a CBS segment gave it validity and airtime. None of it was staged to work that way. It was a running joke, then a product, then a moment that found its own channel, until it finally broke through. The lessons for organizations: hang on to folklore for when the right channel and moment show up.
Not every organization has a one-star review with viral potential sitting in a drawer. But most are sitting on some version of it: a piece of feedback that stings because it isn’t wrong, an unclaimed nickname, a joke that keeps getting made about them. Recognizing that, and knowing when it’s safe to use rather than manage away, is the kind of reframing Teak Media helps clients find in their own stories.
