Payment up front is something we (Cro 2) insist on when running any sort of campaign or competition on forum. We don't work with companies that aren't serius and feel like few months worth of escrowed funds are necessary to show commitment and atrract good members.
Better to always go for an upfront payment incase of uncertainties like this should occur, they may even be the ones loosing instead of putting their campaign participants on a dashed hope on nothing, but there's a level of how one could have built a rapport with these same employers/organizations without them paying up front and then you trust their reputation and representative as well, but in this case, it's risky to take and those managers that engage doing such already have their own personal money as backup in case of uncertainties.
Escrow should be the first thing when it comes to financial related activity in the forum, either a contest, giveaway and campaigns. There are many incidents happened the same as this yet unfortunately we again witness such an event where the manager suffers and covers all the losses.
This should be done first by the managers so that they can avoid to ruin their reputation since case like this will continue to exist and its so hard to repeat the same action where they need to pay their participants coming out on their own pocket. But Royse is for sure well prepared on this kind of situation and we see how he give an assurance that his participants will get compensated.
Good gesture made by other participants that they are showing sympathy to their manager and say that they don't need to get paid since incident already happened, this could lessen the financial damage gotten by the manager.