A smart, gung-ho member of a large Sydney nonprofit’s communications team called us with an enviable dilemma. She’s compiling her communications budget for the upcoming year and the task has just been made more interesting. Her boss has commented that there are some extra dollars available – if she can find smart ways to spend them.
She wanted suggestions for new ways to spend money to improve media coverage and communications generally. Here’s what we came up with:
eNewsletter: establish, design and send. This of course actually saves money, not spends it.
training, training, training: with Hootville, Hootville, Hootville. Enough said.
large scale introductory mail out to media: we’re talking a box (they get opened more readily than envelopes) with some merchandise, an introductory letter explaining the organisation and what it offers media, annual report, an invitation to a one-to-one familiarisation tour of the nonprofit’s impressive facility. The familiarisation would also include meetings with the CEO, researchers and some adorable kids.
research / survey / data: hire someone to create some data – a survey, a study, an analysis of existing data that could form the basis of some media coverage in coming months.
Rush to the polls.
Newspoll: pay Newspoll or something similar to include a question on its regular weekly poll. Again the results become media fodder.
Speaker: fly in a speaker or case study. $10k in airfare, hotel and event costs may score you tens of thousands in media coverage and new relationships. Create an itinerary of public meetings, discussions with pollies and policy makers and of course media engagements. We like this tactic a lot.
What are your suggestions?
Create or sponsor a community event. Invite a ‘celebrity’ either local or otherwise to either host it or take part in it. That would help attract media attention. If you combine your event with another community group then you may also have volunteers from the other group to help you run it. Years ago when working with unemployed youth in the country we organised a Youth Arts Festival to highlight the positive attributes of young people to counteract the notion that if you were young and unemployed you were just a dole bludger.