The power of the press for reaching out to your larger community is a given, and a well conceived press strategy should be part of every company’s plan – but this is especially true if you represent a non-profit organization. I’m guessing that many of you send the occasional press release to local newspapers, and you may also post your news on your own website.

If you are working with limited time and resources and don’t have a dedicated PR professional on your staff, then you especially need those efforts to pay off in positive, upbeat stories about your work.

Are there basic rules to sending out a media alert or press release that will have a better chance of bearing fruit?  I’ve outlined my top 7 tips here:

1) Develop a template for these that will save you time when you are developing them. Make sure you already have a page blank handy that is set up with your contact information, organization name and logo,  It should have a place for:

• The title of the release – it can be creative, but please make sure it says what the topic is. Don’t make the reporter or editor receiving it have to search to know what it’s about.
• The date, and city/state where you (or your news) are located.
• The press contact: Always include the name, title, telephone # and email address of the person that should be contacted for an interview or for more information.
• At the end of the release, include a brief “about us” paragraph or two about your organziation; and include your website URL. This should ideally be the same paragraph every time, for consistency, make it a “boilerplate” part of your template. You can always add a line or two that describes the specific department or program that the release is about, to tailor it.

2) It’s not the great American Novel. When you write the release, remember that you are writing for news outlets. It’s OK to include background about the human interest side of your story. But remember that you are writing the release so that it can be useful to reporters and editors – who will want to use the information in their own work, with their own voice. Give them great material to work with, but don’t fall in love with your own words. Be succinct.

3) Edit yourself with a checklist – does it have all the facts they will need? What happened, when, where, to whom, and why is it news? If you are covering one of your own programs or events, did you remember to say that you were the sponsoring organization?

4) Can I quote you? If a reporter or editor really wants to do in-depth work on your topic, they will call you and others for interviews, and will use their own quotes.  But a really good quote or two is gold for a time-pressed editor; so make it a consistent part of your style to include these. They are also your opportunity to provide perspective beyond the facts.

5) Get ready to lose control. Once the press release has left your desk and been sent to news publications, it is in their hands. They have no obligation to use everything you sent, verbatim. They will more than likely take the pieces from the release that work for them within their story. An ethical reporter will not mis-communicate the facts of the story. But your perspective and point of view may not end up in the final cut.

6) Know your reporters.  Particularly if local news outlets are important to you; but for national outlets as well. If you are doing this right, you won’t simply be peppering the landscape with your alerts and releases, hoping something sticks.  That isn’t worth your valuable time or theirs. Make sure your release topic is relevant to the new outlet, and especially to the reporter, that receives it. Less is more; develop a short list of reporters and editors that you will place your release with; and get to know what their preferred beat is.  What topics and issues do they typically cover, and how? Don’t add them to your send list if you know nothing about them. (Google works great when you want to check out past articles from a new publication or reporter/editor.)

I ran across an interesting blog post on the NonProfit Communicator blog. Lisa Bertagnoli does a good job of explaining what to do – and what not to do – to get her attention with a release.

http://communitymediaworkshop.org/npcommunicator/people-to-pitch-lisa-bertagnoli-freelance-writer/

7) Don’t forget the web.  You may be accustomed to sending all of your press releases to local newspapers; but is it really national news? Does it have regional implications?  Apart from your own website (where you should be posting every release you create), there are some good and inexpensive news services like PRNewswire.com that will post your article on their site and distribution it to news outlets with a wider scope than you probably have. You may gather greater attention to your work by strategically posting selected, very important stories on such a service.  And with well-planned key words, the release may get more attention from even your local reporters; when they receive in their Google alerts.

8) Have a plan.  You can easily inundate your local press outlets with way too many stories that don’t interest them, in which case, they’ll turn you off.  On the other hand, if this isn’t in your comfort zone, or you are a busy person wearing multiple hats, then you may not remember to make strategic use of media exposure. Don’t wait until you are reacting to a negative story; create a calendar and a plan for sending selected news items on a recurring basis that feature the positive, relevant work that you do.

Conversations count

I was talking to a colleague today about my concern over inundating our audiences with surveys, and the message that this high-tech vs. high-touch method might send.

Customer research (like collaboration) is often an exercise in active listening. Fielding a survey is a great way to get more reliable and credible data about trends in response to specific questions.  But it will never do the whole job in terms of allowing you to listen to – and hear – the whole story.

“When you listen generously, people can begin to hear the truth within themselves, in the space that you’ve created for them.”

Your customers’ experiences with their challenges, and with you, come in many shades of gray. When the insight you seek isn’t black and white, you can’t beat a one on one discussion.  Here are a few methods for gaining customer feedback and insight that are not multiple choice; and how they are typically applied:

First, just listen, one-on-one.  Nothing can replace the one-on-one discussion with your customer. Face to face is best, but even on the phone, an open ended conversation to check in can offer valuable insight on the unpredictable. Remember that if you are able to visit your customer on site, it provides an opportunity to more fully understand the environment in which they work. Do they have an office, or walk around? Is there a computer handy? Wall space, clutter, interruptions?  All of the elements of the workplace they are in can influence how well your solutions might – or might not – work for them. Never assume that you understand your customer’s most troubling challenges until you ask. This is not a multiple choice question. It can be helpful to bring trigger questions:

• What is the most exciting work that you’re involved in right now?  Anything you’d like to be working on but don’t have the time or resources?
• What’s looming at this point that you are worried about – what’s keeping you up at night?
• What’s going to be (or what is) toughest about the job right now?

Informal conversations may not be the place to take notes or bring a tape recorder – but once you are out the door, capture what you’ve heard!  Particularly if you are having more than one of these meetings, your findings can start to blur together. If you are pressed for time, tape record a message to yourself with your “notes” about key points (you can do it on your phone); and then keep track later. After several conversations, you will very likely hear some trends that you’ll want to follow up on.

Follow up:  If you are hearing the same pain point from multiple customers, this is an opportunity to plan ahead for collaboration and think about asking a select group if they are interested in collaborating and brainstorming solutions.

Think about convening a group for more feedback or for collaborative work on the problem. 

Focus groups are usually not fishing expeditions, but are set up with willing customers to gain feedback about a particular product or service, challenge, or issue. These are carefully planned to maximize the interaction of the participants. The most useful number of people for a focus group should be from 6-12; and a strong facilitator is needed to ensure that multiple perspectives are gained, and attendees are encouraged and drawn into the discussion. Questions are preplanned. These are often used to get feedback on a prototype service or product in development, or on a brand statement or promotional approach. They tend to be most useful in testing out a concept “before you really build something”.

Collaborative work groups are something different. Customers who are experiencing a like challenge, but are not sure of the solution may be willing to meet with you to conduct brainstorming sessions that are more loosely guided, but still facilitated to get the most from the group dynamic. There are no wrong answers in a brainstorm, it should be well documented, and only at the end of the exercise does it make sense to conduct a check in to determine if members of the group have identified something they are excited about pursuing.

Now you’re building something.  By the time you get to a pilot test, you will have gained early feedback from some of your customers about the concept around your service or product and how it generally works. Especially if the service or product has an online component, or is a service that is complicated to deliver or explain, you will want to gather a small group of possible early adopters and ask them to pilot test for you. These need to be carefully set up, and their evaluations documented and heard. Assume going in that you may hear feedback that generates a change to your service or product. That’s the purpose. This is where you work out the bugs in your approach; or identify that you need to modify the road you are on. Side benefit: if your pilot testers are influential thought leaders, you are hoping at this point to be able to talk about how well the product worked for them, and identify them as development partners later.  The best of all approaches to design, although it can be time consuming and lengthen your process, is iterative design – where you look to your pilot testers to review and provide feedback at multiple steps in your development, and adjust as you learn from them. Then the process becomes much more of a collaborative one.

Keep checking in.  If you have an existing product or service and you are not collecting customer evaluations, start now. Any evaluation should include a valid way to measure customer satisfaction with the experience they’ve just had. You can start by asking the customer to rate their satisfaction.  But most satisfaction evaluations will also ask “how likely are you to use this service or product again?” and “would you recommend it to a colleague?”  These are usually better indicators of true satisfaction – or dissatisfaction – with what they have experienced. If you get a high number of “maybe” answers on using your service again, it’s likely you have some work to do in order to keep these customers; and those customers that would absolutely recommend you may be the champions and influencers you are looking for in your tribe. Don’t lose track of the power of verbatim comments in your evaluation. These can often shed real light on what is best or worst about the experience.

Remember in using any or all of these tools that the data you gain must be captured, documented, and shared effectively to be worth the effort. Even the insight you gain from an otherwise casual discussion can be reported out in some useful fashion to others.