Why You Need Publicity

It's easy to spend all your time focussed on delivering services to your users or chasing funding; but how can you make sure that 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 are influencing 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 do not 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 the original version of this toolkit, we looked at 3 weeks worth of coverage in the 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 (now called “The Third Sector”) than fundraising. In the toolkit you’ll see the media wants “people” stories, and this is an area where voluntary and community 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 had 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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