It’s
always the way: you wait years for an organisation for charity
PR officers and then two come along at once.
Last month saw CharityComms, the brain child of its chair,
nfpSynergy’s Joe Saxton, finally get the go ahead two
years after the idea was first raised. A month after Ian MacQuillin’s
special interest group for PR at the Institute of Fundraising
met for the first time.
Perhaps inevitably, there has been some sniping. MacQuillin,
an account director at Turner PR, says he doesn’t see
the point in CharityComms; most really controversial communications
issues, he maintains, are around fundraising, and the Institute’s
group will be well placed to address them. Saxton, for his
part, thinks this over-simplifies the issue. “I don’t
think anyone, except for Ian, would suggest that all charity
communications are really about fundraising,” he retorts.
But in fact the two are not so very far apart. Both initiatives
are born of a long-standing concern that charities are not
getting the publicity they need. This now seems to be reaching
a peak, and the sector is being urged to address it. Promotional
material for CharityComms, for instance, quotes Charity Commission
chair Suzi Leather, who at the end of last year said communications
had become “the biggest challenge all charities face”.
How it should be addressed is another question, though. Certainly,
it’s tempting to just blame the press. There will probably
have been some in the charity sector who found themselves
agreeing with Tony Blair last month when he complained of
the media’s tendency to resemble a “feral beast”.
Blair’s argument – that reporters were too driven
by “impact” – will be one many recognise;
in fact, one of the first pieces of research conducted when
the Voluntary Action Media Unit (VAMU) was set up in 2005
revealed that many charities felt the media was dominated
by sensationalism, and that this often failed to meet their
needs. It’s a feeling that persists today.
“The charity sector is battling against the media industry’s
antipathy to good news,” says Caroline Diehl, chief
executive at the Media Trust. “That’s the message
we get coming back from charities again and again.”
And it’s not just charities. “We know that government
struggles to get good news stories out there as well,”
she says. “So does the corporate sector. It’s
in the nature of the media to prefer the shock horror story.”
According to Saxton, though, the charity sector does have
a peculiarly hard time. Because, while there is systematic
reporting of the private and public sectors, there’s
no regular mainstream coverage of charities’ affairs.
“Nobody says, ‘I can’t do a business story;
we’ve done one in the last two months,’”
argues Saxton, “but if you try to place a charity story
you will often hear that from the media.”
The result is that charities are badly understood by journalists
and are either reported as being “angels or devils”,
with little in the way of context to temper the reports of
irresponsible spending or life-saving work that the media
seems to prefer.
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The bad news
So what can charities do? Well, for a start they need to
stop whinging. According to MacQuillin, there’s no
mileage to be had complaining about how the media behaves.
“You often hear people at conferences say that the
sector needs to educate the press to write better stories
or make them understand they should be more positive,”
he says. “It’s complete rubbish. The media have
their agenda and they’re not going to change it to
fit in with you.”
Saxton – while more hopeful that media attitudes can
be changed – essentially agrees. "Charities can’t
just go away and say they’ll come back in 20 years
time when they have the kind of coverage they like,”
he says. The challenge is to understand the kind of stories
the media want to run and see where that can benefit the
charity.
Of course, for some charities this won’t be an issue.
Larger groups, particularly, often have excellent PR offices
that know very well how to get the most out of the media.
However, as Penelope Gibbs, director of VAMU, puts it, there’s
a “huge gulf” between the resources available
to those at the top and the majority of groups, which struggle.
In fact, this shouldn’t be a problem, because Gibbs
and others maintain that charities don’t need lots
of money or even personnel to get good coverage. But they
do need to alter their approach.
According to Gibbs, too many rely on mass mailing press
releases to try and get coverage. Instead, she argues, they
need to develop a more tailored approach to different media,
targeting particular publications and programmes, and they
need to look beyond their usual focus on the news pages
of national and local press.
“Charities sometimes struggle to exploit the diversity
of media,” she argues. “Frankly, I think the
news agenda is the hardest to get into. It can be done,
but you’re making life quite difficult for yourself.”
Women’s magazines, the trade press, supplements, feature
pages and contract magazines all offer promising targets
that many charities fail to look at. “It’s all
about targeting,” agrees Diehl.
Fundamentally this comes down to having a more strategic
approach. VAMU’s research has concluded that the majority
of charities have no media strategy and simply put out press
messages ad hoc. This is perhaps understandable given that
the majority don’t have anyone dedicated to PR, but
it is also easily remedied.
“It doesn’t need to be complicated at all,”
says Gideon Burrows, editor at NGO Media, an editorial consultancy
for charities. “For a small charity it’s just
about asking a few basic questions before you begin.”
These are: what messages the charity wants to put out; who
the key audiences it wants to reach are; and what media
types are most effective to reach them.
And invariably this will also mean looking beyond the press,
as Gill Dandy, chair of Fifth Estate, the non-profit sector
group at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, explains.
“Media relations should simply be one element of the
communications strategy,” she says.
According to her, PR messages are most effective when they’re
integrated across all the work that charities are doing.
“Every department needs to be singing from the same
hymn sheet, regardless of the audience. Whether it’s
community relations, corporate relations or donor relations,
the PR messages should go all the way through,” she
argues. “Because if you just look at media relations,
you may end up missing out.”
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PR on a budget: case study
Resources are an issue when it comes to PR, but they’re
not the only issue and it is possible to get good coverage
without spending a fortune.
Merton Cycling Campaign, part of the London Cycling Campaign,
is a tiny organisation reliant on 150 members paying either
£16 or £32 a year.
Consequently, when it was lucky enough to win a £2,500
grant from the City Bridge Trust to develop a cycle training
course, publicising the courses was going to be tricky.
“When I first looked at the cost of advertising in
the local paper, it was absolutely prohibitive,” says
the campaign’s Godwin Calafato.
However, City Bridge is also one of the few trusts that
supports communications work, and as part of its small grants
programme it also offers applicants training through the
Media Trust. Using the skills learnt at the course, Calafato
promoted the new courses with flyers and also contacted
a local reporter asking if she would be interested in taking
a training session and writing it up. The result was a two-page
colour spread in the local paper.
Still, according to Calafato it is hard work to drum up
interest and much of the success is down to promoting the
courses to anyone who will listen. “Every opportunity
I see I take advantage of,” he says, “because
it doesn’t come to you in this life. You have to go
and get it.”
Where to turn: sources of support
CharityComms: www.charitycomms.org.uk
A professional body equivalent to the IoF or CFDG, it will
support all those working in charity communications, both
internal and external. As well as providing networking opportunities
and an extensive website, it will also develop codes of
best practice; a benchmarking service to evaluate communications
departments; a supplier directory; and opportunities for
professional development. It will also take over VAMU’s
askCHARITY service.
PR in Fundraising: www.institute-of-fundraising.org.uk/network
A special interest group of the Institute, it is open to
PRs and anyone else who has a stake in how fundraisers and
fundraising are presented through the media. Its priorities
include identifying which areas of fundraising attract the
most media criticism; developing standard arguments in defence
of various methods of fundraising; and examining how fundraising
dovetails with charities’ PR strategies. It also hopes
to develop greater understanding between fundraising and
communication departments.
The Media Trust: www.mediatrust.org
A charity that runs training courses and events; matches
30 charities a month with pro bono help from volunteers
in the media through its Media Matching service; and runs
the Community Newswire – a free news distribution
service to help community and voluntary groups gain media
coverage. Around 30 stories a day, chosen by two full time
staff at the Press Association, go directly to journalists
around the country.
Fifth Estate: www.ipr.org.uk/fifthestate
A group for non-profits within the Chartered Institute of
Public Relations, it organises regular meetings with speakers
from the media, not-for-profit and other relevant sectors;
runs half day skills workshops; provides a peer mentoring
scheme; and offers a membership directory.
The Voluntary Action Media Unit (VAMU):
www.vamu.org.uk
Launched in January 2005 to improve the relationship between
charities and the media, its funding from the Big Lottery
Fund finishes at the end of the year. As well as conducting
research, it also runs www.askCHARITY.org.uk,
a free online database available to media professionals
listing all charity media contacts and their mobile numbers.
Saxton’s group has agreed to take over running the
service.
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