u
pr 2
impact
or how to make an awesome pr strategy
“ PR 2 impact� is a Devision project financed by the European Union through Erasmus+ programme. The content of this brochure does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Responsibility for the information lies entirely with the author(s). For more materials on communication and public relations for NGOs please read our website: www.communicationpr.com or our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/communicationprcom?ref=hl
“If you don't tell your story, someone else will.” – Unknown Doing the right thing is not enough anymore, building excellent opportunities and delivering awesome projects is not enough in the world we live in today. Why? Because beside building excellent stories for your beneficiaries and improving their lives, it is essential to tell this stories to all the organization’s stakeholders in order to build trust and to get funding. There are millions of non-governmental organizations worldwide, many of them doing good things, each of it doing it in its own specific way, most of their results are amazing. The big problem is that NGO’s are not devoting enough attention to communicate what they are doing. They just do their job, once in a while publish news on their website or posts messages on their Facebook page. But this is not enough anymore. NGOs depend on funding from companies, governments, foundations and individuals in order to carry out their mission. Communicating aimlessly, without a strategy and a very well defined plan is not an option. If they want to raise their impact in the community and to receive more grants and funding they need to learn how to tell their story. They need to touch people hearts, to engage them to become their partners and supporters of their projects. And PR can do that!
Public relations (PR) is the practice of managing the spread of information between an individual or an organization (such as nonprofit organizations, business, government agency,) and the public. Public relations may include an organization or individual gaining exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not require direct payment. This differentiates it from advertising as a form of marketing communications. Public relations is the idea of creating coverage for organizations for free, rather than marketing or advertising.
Moreover, public relations can help us impact our communities in a better way. The origin of the word “impact” is in 1817 when Samuel Taylor Coleridge apparently used it first in a figurative sense meaning ‘forceful impression’. Forceful impression can really make the difference when you are putting all your effort on “doing something good for build a better world”. Doing something good for people (as NGOs daily do) is remarkable and universally useful, but sometimes it is just not enough, you need to promote your activities and expand your public relations for being effective in what you do. So being effective it is not just about the content of your message or activities, but also about the way in which you are spreading, organizing and sharing it. Organizations can have an excellent plan or idea for their beneficiaries, but if they do not have the abilities for building relations with local institutions, if they are not able to reach their target groups, if they do not have the money for financing it, all of their wonderful ideas will be inffective and useless.
The solution is to reflect and experience how to “impact” your daily “doing good”, using new and old PR tools because non-governmental work is not only about doing good, but is about being very focused on the results.
In order to properly present their story, NGO’s need to have a PR strategy with focused actions for specific target groups. What should NGOs take into consideration when writing their PR strategy?
1. Research You cannot do a good strategy without research about your field, your target groups, possible instruments and activities. Most important tool that you can use is a SWOT analysis that can help you understand your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Then, after you clearly understand what your assets are, try to analyze the environment, to understand the context of your strategy plan (what are others NGOs on the market doing, how they are promoting their projects and campaigns, what is the social, economic and political context, what important changes will happen in the next period (for ex. Elections, changes in the laws that regulate the NGOs activities or the taxes system). You can use for that a PEST analysis (this involves listing the Political, Economic, Social and Technological factors that could affect your organization’s work. These could be positive or negative factors and should include issues that are likely to have an impact on how your organization operates. You should indicate why each factor will have an effect. For example, under ‘political’ you might include: change of government that will lead to needs to build contacts with new civil servants/MPs, need to understand new policy agenda).
Political Factors Economic Factors Sociocultural Factors Technological Factors
It’s very important to know and to understand all the data and information to be able to create a useful and sustainable PR strategy for your NGO. Although it may sound complicated, it is not difficult at all. You can do this research by collecting both quantitative (number of NGO’s, number of projects implemented, number of participants in your events, number of interactions on your social media accounts and so on) and qualitative data (how are you perceived on the market, how are NGOs similar to you perceived, what kind of projects do you do, what projects do others do). You can use online or phone interviews, face to face discussions, online surveys (a useful platform for that is https://www.surveymonkey.com/ ), media materials and other NGO’s websites and social accounts analysis. No matter the instrument you use it is important to stay focused and to understand clearly what are you doing right now, what are other NGO’s from your field doing and what is the economic, social and political context that can influence your activity.
2. Target group It is very important to adapt and to take into consideration all aspects of target groups' needs. Take into consideration not only your direct beneficiaries but also your indirect beneficiaries and stakeholder. Remember, an NGO interacts not only with its beneficiaries but also with important stakeholders in the community such as local and national authorities, other organizations, mass-media, general public, and it should take into consideration all these target groups when creating its strategy. After you identify your target group you should make a general classification: sympathizers, supporters, employees, sponsors and, segment then by behavior: for example, supporters can be very active, can participate to your events, promote your actions, donate money, or can be less active, just follow your online activity without getting involved. In analyzing the public, it is important to identify which are the most important (urgent) needs of each target audience which your organization can solve. Most importantly, you should start prioritizing your different audiences and establish a communication plan with them according to what actions you plan for the year. This helps you finding out which are the most important and therefore to whom you should communicate more and be more focused on. employees
sympatizers supporters
sponsors
3. Clear goals and realistic objectives It is important to establish clear goals and realistic objectives, if an objective cannot be counted then it is clear and realistic. Also you should make sure your strategy objectives closely reflect your overall organizational plan and your communications objectives will contribute to the achievement of the overall objectives of the organization. In order to make sure PR objectives are manageable, you should make them be SMART: - Specific – be specific when articulating your goals and objectives; - Measurable – choose relevant and suitable metrics to measure progress or results; - Agreed – it is important for all relevant stakeholders to agree on proposed objectives; - Realistic – keep objectives realistic by breaking larger or more complex objectives into smaller ones. Make the objectives challenging but achievable; - Timed – employ timelines to ensure objectives have clear deliverables
4. Key messages After writing your objectives, you should break them down into relevant messages for each of your audiences; When you elaborate your messages you should take into consideration the following recommendations: •
Create interesting and clear messages that people will identify with and they will find captivating;
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Communicate your messages through storytelling, use people’s stories to inspire others to get involved and be active;
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Do not use very sophisticated and complicate phrases, stick to the point, create messages using common words that we all understand
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Be consistent, timely, truthful and relevant in your messages;
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Avoid talking about your organization, instead, talk about the value of what your organization does;
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Your message needs to always link back to your key organizational objectives and values;
5. Action plan and evaluation In order to achieve the goals set you should choose the appropriate channels. For each identified target group, you should now indicate the most appropriate channels for communicating with them. These might include newsletters, press releases, conferences, workshops, leaflets, brochures, blogs or broader methods such as media and your website. By using online tools and focus groups try to realize a simple internal analysis of the channels you have at your disposal to see which are the best to use for getting specific messages to particular audiences. Once you have looked at the channels you have, you can begin to construct your communications plan, linking audiences, messages and channels. Your plan should be flexible, simple and very realistic in terms of resources both human and financial as it might be possible for you to be obliged to adapt to new situations in case things do not work out as planned. Your communication strategy needs also clear instrument of measuring its impact and evaluating it. The best way is to establish qualitative and quantitative instruments of evaluation in order to have a clear and objective imagine on the way your strategy was implemented and what results you managed to achieve. You could also include measures of media coverage or online traffic (website, social media) as evaluation instruments you have specific online actions in your plan.
A press release is a written statement to the media. It can announce a range of news items, including scheduled events, projects launchings, and awards. They are used to inform the media about an important issue regarding your organization. There are a few important things you should take into consideration when writing a press release: • • •
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Do not send a press release unless the information you want to transmit is valuable, newsworthy otherwise you will not get media coverage; Headlines that inspire and stick to the point. Write brief, clear and to the point headlines as they should be an ultra-compact version of the press release’s key point. Start the press release with the date and city and use the rule of the inverted pyramid to structure your text: the most substantial, interesting, and important information the writer means to convey should head the article. So your first paragraph should be a summary of the story (in no more than around 15-20 words); Communicate the "5 W's" (and the H) clearly. Who, what, when, where, why ––and how–– should tell the reader everything they need to know;
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Be concise, respect the grammar rules. The ideal length of a press release is about an A4 side or about 300 to 400 words (the length of a short news item). That's just three or four short paragraphs and a couple of quotes so try to keep this in mind when you write your press release; Include quotes from people in your organization to provide insight and opinion and sound like a real person said them. Try to avoid jargon or technical language; Try to provide maximum use of concrete facts as they are news. Don’t try to transform your press release in a story, but be as clear and simple as possible; Tie it together. Provide some extra information links that support your press release. Offer additional online resources;
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Write a boilerplate underneath the body of your release. Include here information about your company; Add your contact information: the company's official name, media department's official name and contact person, office address, telephone and fax numbers with proper country/city codes and extension numbers, mobile phone number (optional), email addresses, website address.
And, most importantly, if you want journalists to open your email with your press release do not write just press release because usually journalists receive many emails having this subject and most of them go to the recycle bin. Try to write a clear and catchy subject of the email to capture the journalist’s attention and to make him open the email and read your press release.
In order to create a significant digital presence you should have a social media plan whose goal is to get people engaged in your message. Thus, the most important thing is to do ask yourself a few questions: •
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What social networks does your audience use (you should have an account on the social networks where your audience is, otherwise you’re using your resources on platforms where your messages does not get to the wanted target groups) Communicate the same message on all your social accounts but do it by keeping their specificity What types of activities do you want your target audience to engage in (activists’ campaigns, information dissemination, donations). According to your purpose, you will choose your messages and social media channels appropriately to your audience’s interests and needs.
In order to have success in social media you should take some things into consideration like picking up the right network (where your audience is), be as visual as possible (present ideas through visual stuff, not only words), tell your stories concise and clear by using mixed media (words, info graphics, videos), provide in depth articles such as statistics, analysis, study cases, interviews. But most importantly is to keep it simple and tell your story in simple words, show your target audience the people behind those stories, build empathy and interest. Last, but not least, it is important to be interactive, to ask people to contribute with opinions, your purpose is not only to produce information and content but to engage your audience into conversation. Also, connect all your media to each other, for example connect Twitter with Facebook and connect both to your website.
In every NGO, there should be a fundraising department, if you want to continue to grow your projects, to involve more people in your cause. It is true that this is a challenging department, because you need to bring money, you need to convince people to donate, you have to go to companies and invite them to be your partners and often you deal with the big NO, and rejections, and sometime this kind of activity can be frustrating. The reality is that you need money to save the world, to continue to do good and support this cause. This is a pragmatic point of view but at the same time this is the reality of our world! You can write projects to get funds, but they are for a limited period of time, and after the projects have ended, in order to continue you need sponsorships, donations, a good fundraising campaign.
The first recommendations that I have is to change your mental set-up. Instead of fundraising, look at this activity as FRIENDraising. You need to get out, to speak with many people, but if you are aware that your first goal is to make many friends, and every new person with who you speak can be a possible friend for you and your organization, it takes a lot of pressure of your shoulders! Friends are more willing to support you, because they know you better, they trust you, they have the time to observe your activity and your commitment to your cause. Do you know the tree basic F in fundraising? If you are making your first baby step in the fundraising activity, you should develop your “fundraising abilities” by getting donations from : FAMILY FRIENDS FOLKS Good look in your fundraising activity and don’t forget to make many friends!
ADD FRIEND
Doug Newsom, Bob Carrell, “Public relations writing: form and style” Joe Marconi, “Public Relations: the complete guide” www.entrepreneur.com www.segalfamilyfoundation.org www.ngostorytelling.com https://www.salto-youth.net/ https://www.facebook.com/SocialMediaTipsforNGOs https://www.facebook.com/SocialMediaTipsforNGOs http://www.prweb.com/ http://www.prweek.com/uk http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ http://usefulsocialmedia.com/ www.prnewswire.com www.prdaily.com
This communication guide has been developed on behalf of the PR 2 Impact project financed by Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission. The projects was implemented by Devision Association (Romania) with the support of 4 partners: - Tรกmaszpont MOP KKA (Hungary) - Comitato d'Intesa tra le associazioni volontaristiche della Provincia di Belluno (Italy) - Fundacja Instytut Innowacji (Poland) - Unique Projects (Lithuania). Thank you to all our 23 participants who got involved into the realization of this brochure and we hope it will be helpful for those who read it. www.communicationpr.com https://www.facebook.com/AsociatiaDevision