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.

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