Nonprofit Communications

By Guest Blogger Claire “Voyant” Meyerhoff

On Monday, I gave you my new acronym for getting press coverage — the Triple Ps: Precise Perfect Placement. I explained how I was going to put it to the test this week for a Mother’s Day event.

So here’s my casual Friday update. Like I said, I did a very precise pitch to get my pro-bono nonprofit client some publicity. I made a couple of phone calls and sent an email.

First, the event:

My hairstylist Janice and I are going to the Ronald McDonald House of Durham on Mother’s Day. Janice is going to cut hair for the moms who have more on their minds than their hair. They’re far from home, caring for a seriously ill child.

Janice and I did this last year and it was a big hit. It all started when we learned (while she was doing my hair) that we both dislike Mother’s Day because our moms are gone (as in deceased).

My goal this year is to get some QUALITY coverage for the Ronald McDonald House of Durham. I called the Raleigh News and Observer and followed up with an email. Granted, I spoke to the Executive Editor, who is an old acquaintance, and he offered to pass along the info the weekend editor. Still, a good story is a good story. I’m hoping they send a photographer to take some nice photos of the Moms — and that these photos will be in their print edition and on their website.

I made one other phone call — this one to N&O columnist Ruth Sheehan. Now, while the House is in Durham, we hope to expand our donor base in Raleigh, since there is no Ronald McDonald House there. So the N&O is a natural choice. I read Ruth’s column all the time and thought she might like this story.

The key words here are: I THOUGHT SHE MIGHT LIKE THE STORY.

Not — I want her to do the story, or she SHOULD do the story, just . . . hey, she might like this . . . it might be right up her alley. I’m familiar with THE TYPE OF STORY Ruth covers and realize she is always on the lookout for good stories. I know my story is a good story, because when I tell people about Janice cutting hair for the Mom’s, people say, “wow, that’s really great!”

A few days later, Ruth called. We set up a time to meet for coffee. We had a lovely chat and I gave her Janice’s phone number.

A few days later, this is what turned up in the Raleigh News and Observer.

I think the Triple P’s are working, don’t you?

By Guest Blogger Claire “Voyant” Meyerhoff

Fanfare please.

“Ladies and Gentleman, Claire Meyerhoff and Nonprofit Marketing Guide present a new acronym . . .”

PPP

The Three P’s of Pitching will help your nonprofit get better coverage! It will solve all your public relations problems! It will build strong bones twelve different ways! Nine out of ten doctors recommend it!

Or maybe the Three P’s will simply give you a new way of looking at taming that beast called “Media Coverage.” I will now reveal the words behind our acronym . . .

3P’s of Pitching

• Precise
• Perfect
• Placement

If you’re the lucky gal or guy in charge of “getting coverage” for your organization, maybe this is your strategy: You write a press release, send it to every news outlet in town, then make follow up calls. Then you’re disappointed when you don’t get coverage. And it really is a good story.

Some media consultant types do the “blanket pitch.” They contact every single reporter they know, or don’t know, and pitch the same story to everyone. They blanket the city with press releases, jamming the e-mail boxes of every assignment editor, reporter, associate producer, desk assistant and newsroom secretary in the market. Even the guy who services the vending machine at Action News 15 gets the e-mail, “Nonprofit Announces Boring Survey.”

Not me. I do a very targeted pitch. Precise Perfect Placement.

Since Kivi likes exciting experiments, I’m going to bring one to her Laboratory . . .

I’m in charge of a certain nonprofit’s small event on Mother’s Day, May 11, 2008. My entire media strategy includes two phone calls, one e-mail and then some follow-up phone calls.

Next Monday, May 12th, I’ll let you know how it went.

Hopefully, I’ll have good news (and my client will have made news).

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Want more of Claire’s advice? You can listen to her teleseminar with Kivi earlier this year called “Getting Reporters to Cover Your Nonprofit” for free! Get the mp3 link now.

By Guest Blogger Claire “Voyant” Meyerhoff

In the old days, before the Internet and even fax machines, the Press Release (aka News Release) was Queen of P.R. All over the country, Newsroom Assistants earning $4/hour sorted mail, opened envelopes, unfolded press releases and stacked them in neat piles. For many of these bottom-of-the-totem polers, it was their first real taste of “the power to decide what is news.”

“Hmmm, Senator Charles Grassley is spearheading an effort to make July ‘National Corn Month.’ I’ll put that in the ‘boring government stuff’ stack,” thought Debbie Duespayer, a Desk Assistant in a broadcast newsroom, circa 1984.

“Oh, Mothers Against Drunk Driving is holding an event where they’re going to get a local celebrity intoxicated and do their blood alcohol level on the spot. I’ll put that in the ‘my producer might like this’ stack,” thought Debbie, as she looked at her watch and noticed it was 2:00 a.m. “I leave here in two hours; I hope my VCR recorded Cheers,” she thought. (Note: Never forget that your news release may be read by a person making even less money and working worse hours than you. And you work for a nonprofit . . . so that says something.)

This is what used to happen to press releases. They were put into piles, then the chosen ones were plucked out and put into the “Future File.” Then, the day before, an assignment editor would pull the Future File for the next day and look at all the press releases to see if there was anything worth covering. The rest were chucked in the bin.

My former boss at all-news WTOP, Holland Cooke, even wrote a book called “How to Keep Your Press Release out of the Trash Basket.” Something like that. I would call him to get the exact title, but he’s in Vegas right now attending the “Media Consultants Rule the World But Have to Travel 350 Days a Year to Do It Expo” and I don’t want to bother him.

Out of the trash basket and back to this blog . . .

Obviously, from the senders point of view, it was very important to have a good press release that had the four C’s — CATCHY, CLEAR, CONCISE, and CORRECT — in order to keep it out of the trash basket. Putting all the “go to” information right up top helped, too. I can’t tell you how many times Debbie Duespayer got ticked off because there was no location listed for an “Urgent Press Conference.”

That was then . . . this is now. The Internet has changed things. Debbie Duespayer is now Destiny Duespayer. She’s still working the overnight shift, but she’s reading e-mails pitches instead of opening envelopes.

That’s what we’ll talk about this week during the webinar Kivi and I are doing on Thursday called “How to Write a Press Release Reporters Will Love.” Be there. Or beware: Destiny may delete your e-release.

Please welcome Claire Voyant — a new guest blogger here at Nonprofit Communications. Claire (whose last name is actually Meyerhoff) sees things others don’t! You’ll be able to find all of Claire’s posts in a new category on this blog called Claire Voyant.

~ Kivi

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By Guest Blogger Claire Voyant

Here I am, Claire Voyant, . . . and I see a trend, people! Actually, it’s Kivi who sees things clearly by highlighting the Humane Society’s spin on the meat mess. By focusing on kids, not cows, the Humane Society got great publicity for their organization.

This is a twist on what I like to call “tag-along” publicity – hitching your nonprofit to someone else’s wagon. When I worked for the National Safe Kids Campaign in D.C, we wanted to publicize accidental poisonings. Sure, we did press releases and fact sheets. No coverage. Then a policy person mentioned that D.C.’s “Mr. Yuck,” based at Georgetown Hospital, was about to lose it’s funding – and it’s home.

With just a few phone calls, I learned the details about their money troubles, rounded up a local family that had a good outcome because of a call to Mr. Yuck, and a TV reporter interested in the story. The next evening, the story, including an interview with a Safe Kids expert, led the local ABC’s 11pm newscast.

We also wrote an editorial that landed in the Washington Post that we got some more coverage. Eventually, the National Capitol Poison Center found a new home and affiliation with George Washington University Hospital.

If you think your organization’s mission is a story in itself (“but we do such great work!”), think again. Unless you’re making news, find some news that you can “tag-along,” team-up, and pitch your story that way.

Most nights I watch the NBC Nightly News and last night I saw two stories with interesting nonprofit marketing angles. They provide two great examples of how to create story hooks that are so enticing that the media simply can’t pass them up.

Lesson #1: If your point isn’t quite compelling enough, it’s OK to elevate a secondary point that is.

The first story was the massive beef recall, the largest in American history, that was based directly on an undercover investigation by the Humane Society of the United States. I used to freelance for the HSUS, so I’m familiar with many of their undercover investigations over the years. They always reveal truly disgusting behavior by human beings against animals — this time forcing sick cows to their feet with electric shocks and bulldozers, since the animals are supposed to be healthy enough to walk on their own to slaughter. As disturbing as this story is, I don’t believe it would have been near the top of the broadcast without this secondary hook: much of the meat went into the National School Lunch Program.

Americans who might otherwise turn a blind eye to exactly how low we humans will go as we turn cows into steaks suddenly get interested when it’s little kids, many of them poor, being served hamburgers made from cows too sick to stand. The HSUS very wisely turned this into more than a story about tortured cows. It became a story about what the federal government is feeding kids at school, and they got massive exposure as a result.

In fact, the HSUS contacted school officials directly in 36 states on January 31 warning them about the beef, well before the USDA forced the recall this week. It’s a great case study in public advocacy — directly connecting animal rights and human health — and also great message development. If you are a big meat eater, you may not care how a bunch of sick cows are treated, but it’s hard to ignore children being fed beef that’s much more likely to carry mad cow disease and other contamination.

Lesson #2: A simple, real, personal story drives home a point better than statistics.

Toward the end of the broadcast, we learned about how U.S. government aid is supporting a foster home and school in Uganda that takes in children whose parents have died of AIDS. Many of the children are HIV positive as well, and our aid pays for their anti-viral drugs. It’s a heart-warming story, but the hook that opened and closed the story really drove home the point.

The founder of the foster home had been asked by a prostitute several years earlier for some poison. The prostitute was dying of AIDS and rather than orphan her two small daughters, who would have surely been forced into prostitution themselves, she wanted to kill herself and them.

Instead this woman took the two girls home with her and started the foster home. Today the two girls are healthy young woman, with a bright future ahead of them, because of the generosity of not only this one woman, but also the U.S. government. The story opened and closed with the foster home founder talking specifically about the two girls.

No matter what issue you are discussing, you are much more likely to capture the media’s interest if you can put an actual human face on the story. A so-so story about U.S. aid to Africa becomes riveting when you introduce the painful past and hopeful future of these two real girls.

If you aren’t getting the kind of media coverage you’d like, apply these two lessons to your media pitches and maybe one evening Brian Williams will be talking about your good work.

As of this morning, 44 nonprofits have signed up for this week’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide teleseminar called “Getting Reporters to Cover Your Nonprofit: Tell Your Story So They’ll Tell It Too” with Claire Meyerhoff. You’ve still got time to register before the call starts on Wednesday 2/6/2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Registration is just $20 and that covers as many people as can comfortably sit around the speaker phone in your office.

We’ll be taking questions for most of the call via email and IM, but you can send in questions in advance too, whether you are registered or not. Just email them to ask@hotseatquestions.com. It’s a special email address I set up just for these “Hot Seat” interviews with experts. I’ll post a few of the best Q&As here after the call.
Here is a small excerpt from one of Claire’s messages to me as we’ve been preparing for this call:

“Nonprofits spend so much time thinking about relationships when it comes to $$$, yet when it comes to getting coverage, they think they can fire off a lame press release (caring and sharing and hope and hearts and helping and giving, blah blah blah) and get coverage. It takes time to cultivate contacts in the media!”

That’s just a tiny taste of the great real-world wisdom Claire will share with us on Wednesday. Register now to be a part of it.

Claire Meyerhoff

Last month, Claire Meyerhoff called to interview me about nonprofit storytelling for some articles she is working on, and we ended up having an hour-and-a-half chat about how hard it is for so many nonprofits to get press coverage, even though they have such great stories to tell.

We shared all kinds of theories about why this is true, and one of Claire’s points was really on target: Nonprofits need to cut the bull! Blathering on about your wonky mission statement, the infinitely deep root causes of a problem, and the complicated system-wide solutions required just doesn’t work for print reporters who need to think in terms of hundreds of words, not thousands, and TV journalists who can give you only 30 seconds of airtime.

I was so impressed with Claire’s down-to-earth perspective that I asked if she’d be interested in doing a teleseminar with me. Then she told me a bit more about her history and I couldn’t wait to host this event.

If you can spare $20 for some great media training, here’s where you should spend it:

Getting Reporters to Cover Your Nonprofit: How to Tell Your Story So They’ll Tell It Too!

It’s next week’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide teleseminar (in other words, it’s a toll-free conference call) on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific). Gather ’round the speaker phone — as long as you are all from the same organization, $20 buys training for your whole staff.

Here’s what you should know about Claire, and why I was so eager to introduce her to all of you. Claire is a communications professional who has spent twenty-something years spreading the word with no muss and no fuss. As a news writer in CNN’s Washington bureau, she took complex stories and honed them into :30 worth of copy fit for Judy Woodruff and Wolf Blitzer. She also helped the National Safe Kids Campaign make the CBS Evening News — and I’ll have her share the story about why that wouldn’t have happened if she had done what the “higher ups” wanted her to do.

She has also reported on Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath on XM Radio’s “Red Cross Radio” channel, and she wrote and narrated an award-wining video for Ronald McDonald House of Durham, NC. Simply put, Claire gets nonprofits and on Wednesday, she’ll help you get the media.

I’m calling this a “Hot Seat” interview, which means I’ll spend the first 15-20 minutes of the hour-long call peppering Claire with some good, tough questions. Then it’s your turn. You can submit questions in advance and during the teleseminar via email to ask AT hotseatquestions.com or send them in via AIM to hotseatquestions.

Get the details and register for the teleseminar now.

In addition to helping nonprofits with their print and online communications, I also do some freelance writing on the side and am now contributing to GreenBiz.com. I wrote this week’s feature article, “Corporate Giants Find Success in Unexpected Partnerships” about Dell’s environmental partnerships with Goodwill and the National Cristina Foundation and Abitibi-Consolidated’s partnerships with thousands of small community groups.

If you know of a great story about how a business is working with a nonprofit to accomplish an environmental goal, I’d love to hear it. I am not interested in partnerships that are really just sponsorship or marketing arrangements. I want to hear about partnerships where the nonprofit and the business are working hand-in-hand to bring about environmental results.

Thanks in advance for the tips!