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Why You Need Publicity
It's easy to spend all of your time focussed on delivering
services to your users or chasing funding, but how can you
make sure the people who hold the grant purse strings choose
your group, and how do you attract more volunteers or
clients?
The answer (in part) is through the media. With a good media
campaign you could find you'll influence policymakers. For
example, a problem like a shortage of carers may become
"real" to politicians when the story has been highlighted in
the media.
Organisations that rely on public money, whether it is
through grants or donations/fundraising, need to be able to
justify and explain their work.
A good way to assess whether you need help with your
publicity is to gather all the press cuttings about your
organisation and put them in a portfolio. If you don’t have
many press cuttings, then now is the time to start using this
toolkit. Keeping press cuttings is not only useful for
monitoring your media performance; they can be used as
supporting evidence for funding applications.
You may think your organisation is good at getting
publicity, but are you getting as much coverage as you
could? Before embarking on this toolkit we looked at 3 weeks
worth of East Anglian Daily Times (September 2005). When you
exclude the Community News pages, charities and the
voluntary sector appeared in 75 stories. 27 of those stories
had a photo as well as some editorial copy, and the pictures
ranged from cute otters to a drummer taking part in a “drumathon”.
Most of the coverage was about fundraising. There were 16
stories about fundraising events that were coming up, and
there were 15 stories about events that had already happened.
Charities used the “letters page” 13 times to let people
know how a street collection went, but only 3 letters from
charities to the editor commented on issues and news
stories.
There is more to the voluntary and community sector than
fundraising. In the toolkit you’ll see the media wants
“people” stories, and this is an area where charities and
the voluntary groups can come up trumps. There were only a
few “profile” stories amongst the survey sample – one about
a mother and her disabled son who’d received help from a
charity called REACT and another was about Maureen Reynel
who had received an award after setting up a charity called
Families in Need. In three weeks, there was just one “double
page spread” on a charity.
The EADT ran a feature on the 90th anniversary of the WI,
telling the story of the formation of the Federation from a
national and local perspective. Couldn’t your group use its
anniversary (25/50/60 years) as a platform for publicity?
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