Save the Children has displayed its PR smarts by using Mother’s Day as an opportune time to release a global index ranking the best and worst countries to be a mother. Australia is #2 by the way, so stop complaining.
Lesson #1 Every event on the calendar – from state and federal budgets to Groundhog Day – can be leveraged by non profit PR people to highlight their chosen issues. The connection doesn’t need to be obvious and you don’t need to ‘own’ the event.
Lesson #2 Creating an index or ranking means many more media opportunities as each audience being compared is interested in how it compared to others. This is true of nations as it is of local government areas or football teams. In this case a global story suddenly becomes relevant to each individual country.
A smaller-scale example of this is NRMA’s annual release of data comparing each locality for car theft. Every state media outlet wants to know how its state compares and how each locality within the state compared. Local papers jump on the story each year because the publicists have mined the data to provide a local angle.
We’ve done this with foster care. Instead of getting one statewide story about the shortage of foster carers across the state, we broke it down into regions giving the shortfall for each. Suddenly we made a state-based story relevant to endless local papers. It took some work to get the data but it was worth it.
Indexes can be repeated each year, providing something else media loves – trends, comparisons, change.