PR Planning for Nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations (and some arts-oriented businesses) are always lacking the funds to really  put together effective marketing plans.  It takes bucks to buy ads no matter what the media.  This is why PR is so very important to most nonprofits.  Yeah, it's a crap shoot but with proper planning sometimes you can get killer results.  Although this article is focused on British charities, David Hamilton has some very good ideas for nonprofits here in the US.

and here is your unrelated photo from 2013

Hear those Birdies?

NO?  Then you must not be on Twitter, one of the most interesting social media sites.  Twitter can be a useful tool in the PR practitioners kit bag, but it's also good to get an overview on what it can do for you first.  Here at Running with Scissors, where I have my art studio, they recently had someone come in to give a low-cost class in it. Unfortunately it didn't work out with my schedule so I wasn't able to attend.  I'm always interested in seeing what other folks have to say about the intersection of Twitter and PR. 

But the big issues with any kind of marketing (more than PR) is how to measure results.  In PR, it's rather loosey-goosey as it can take years of solid work to create an image in the public's eye, especially when you're just using that and not spending money on advertising.  So I thought it was interesting when this arrived in my email.  I'll save you the spam that you'll get if you sign up for it with your own email address.

Then I stumbled across this article on Forbes.  Best takeaways for me were:

• Join a Directory: There are dozens of directories of Twitter users online, including Twiends, WeFollow, and Twellow. Add yourself to as many directories as you can find under the proper categories, and you will begin to see some users following you from these sites.
• Guest blogging or blogging about your twitter account.  “This strategy works very well if you can give readers an incentive to follow you.”

Follow me @anntracy..... and now for the unrelated photo of the day

 Shot during a performance by Collective Motion, a new modern dance company here in Southern Maine.  Shooting by the seat of one's pants is always exciting and even more so when the photos turn out!  If you'd like to follow my photography blog, here it is.

Point of View

Is so very important whether you're writing a novel, play, screenplay or news release.  I hadn't thought about it in context of marketing and general sales, but my friend David Ligon just made a very good post about points of reference on his blog and I thought it would be good to share it with you here.  It's also true about artists in valuing their work. 

And here is your random photo of the day - Venice from 2010 as a painting.

Some Good Advice

Nothing like starting off the New Year with some good advice about who to pitch a story to in various media.  Or how to start a media list with the emails of those who might be interested in your story or concept.  The Social Media Today site has a good article on that subject written by Carrie Morgan.  As a former member of the 4th Estate, I think she's right on in finding out who to target where.  As your release hits the desks of these people, just pray there isn't a 5 alarm fire or high profile crime story that can knock you out of the running for inclusion. 

Even with the best of advice and best practices, PR has been and looks like it always will be a crap shoot.  But those who succeed in developing good relations with media, there will be a pay off on a slow news day.

What One Thing do Baseball and PR Have in Common?

Today a first for me - writing a headline that is a question and almost sounds like a joke!  But it's not when you think of PR as pitching - which is quite important in baseball as well.  Except when it comes to pitchers duels, those really bore the crap out of me.  But enough of me, what about you when it comes to pitching?  If you're like me, the news release headline is probably the biggest of the pitches I'll use.  But Sarah Skerik begs to differ with us and I think she's got some good points in her article here.  And she is specific as to the WHY being the biggest W in terms of pitching, especially when it comes to social media.

Wave of the Future?

There's nothing like trying to predict the future to catch someone's interest.  I think that's why astrology is still featured in the local fish wraps and right here on the internet.  But what about the evolution of the internet and how we interact with each other?  I'll bet that probably half the folks reading this blog were not on the internet as much five years ago as they are now.  Although the topic isn't strictly PR oriented it does have some bearing on how we get our messages noticed in our brave new world now and five years into the future.  We can thank Josh Miller over at Medium.com for his insights.

More Social Media Rules

Like those magazines that headline 5 Ways to Fill in the Blank or 8 Things You Should Know, we've now got another list of 10 Rules for Attaining Success in Social Media - click here.

However, this time the advice is coming from a worthy source - Guy Kawasaki.  After surviving two stints working for Steve Jobs at Apple, Kawasaki has become a go-to guy about all things Silicon Valley and start ups.  His advise in the article is spot on IMHO.

The only "What???" moment I had was that he tweets the same stuff all day because of the way people jump on and off Twitter.  We used to do that in radio news as well.  We figured the average listener was in the car for a max of 90 minutes, so the first 90 minutes at work was writing all new newscasts.  After that, we would rotate the stories every 90 minutes.  You also find that in TV on CNN - although I think that they rotate every hour....

Special thanks to Joe Nalven at the Digital Art Guild for turning me on to this story!

Fakebook?

With traditional media outlets putting the squeeze on editorial or just plain disappearing, I have been a big fan of social media taking it's place.  Facebook seemed like the perfect site for letting people know what you're doing either via a fan page or as an individual.  Remember how your FB friends howled when they changed the timeline?  Did you notice that you weren't seeing as many of your friends posts as before?  Changes coming down the pike again according to the folks at Dangerous Minds, and it will cost you an arm and a leg.

Learning to Like Facebook

I help out with PR at Constellation Gallery here in Portland Maine.  We're trying to get the word out about our shows and gain a reputation with local media so that when we do have a "big" news story, we might get some ink.  But one of the other things we need to do is to keep up the work in social media. 

Today I met with another member artist (we're a collective or cooperative that runs the gallery) who is going to help by posting our information on local websites and the like.  He's old school and came up through the ranks as a graphic designer and then a journalist in Europe.  He is skeptical about Facebook.  But he also sees how editorial inches and the papers themselves are shrinking.

I think it's that he doesn't like the idea of it.  But it certainly is a way to get information out there.   But there are effective and ineffective ways to go about it.  Just about the whole industry is in a learning curve. 

That's why it's good to listen to all voices out there even if  they're talking specifically about marketing rather than just PR, like the folks at Synapse Marketing are in this article.  

PR 101

Every once in a while, it's always good to be reminded of the basics.  One of the most basic things in PR is the event and news release.  Notice the distinction there?  An event release is to inform the media of an event that is happening and that is the news worthy angle.  A news release on the other hand has more "newsworthy" information in it that might entice a reporter to interview the client.  This article (originally posted by Arthur Fink on Facebook) is a gentle reminder that we need to realize how bombarded the media is these days and not to try to make PR mountains out of molehills.

Just July?

Although I try to post more than once a month, it seems as though that's my current posting schedule.  Of course I was very busy this spring and early summer consulting for the Portland Performing Arts Festival and now I'm helping with the PR for Constellation Gallery in Portland. No more excuses.

I have an old (actually I think he's younger than I am) friend in Sacramento who has been doing marketing consulting for many years.  Yes, I'm talking about YOU Michael Boyd!  I first meet Micheal when he ran a small desktop publishing business in midtown Sacramento.  This was back in the day when the archival color printers were still too expensive for mere mortals like me to own.

Today Micheal posted a very good article about the best times to post on social media sites.  Of course I'm not posting this blog at a very good time according to the article.  As a writer I need to write when the spirit moves me however, which is a little different than posting for PR's sake.

I've also almost finished the final rewrite for my PR booklet - Public Relations for Artists, Photographers And other Creatives.  Many thanks to consultant Bob Walters and write Kate Maney for their feedback.  I'm thinking that I will go the Amazon route, but will post more info on that when I sort it all out.

What's New is Old Again

Back in the days before social media, most PR types tried to coordinate their efforts with the marketing folks because PR campaigns will have better traction if they are tied to when ads in a variety of media are airing.  It's the bombardment theory: direct mail advertising, ads in print and radio and TV happening all at the same time will have a greater impact.  Makes sense doesn't it?  Especially when you know that it takes at least seven ads before people actually "see" the ad.  To me this is an indicator that if you can't spend a wad of money on ads, you can at least try to hit as many PR places as possible. 

In this age of social media, the folks over at PR Newswire have come out with a "White Paper" which shows what is old is new again.  I guess one can say that certain human behaviors haven't changed - even when it comes to social media.  I'll bet that other keen observer of human behavior - Shakespeare - would agree.

Social Media Branding Nirvana: Transparency

When I come across a phrase like that I have to steal it,  use it with attribution (Thanks Todd Wasserman).  I ran across it in an article from one of my most consistent sources - Mashable.  I think we all remember the Toyota snafu when millions of cars had to be recalled.  This shows a high level of awareness of remembering that a company must communicate, especially during bad times.  I never saw the interview mentioned in the article and it seems as if they engineered it to look more "transparent".

But that said, it shows that when bad things happen, one must be on the spot with releasing news to the public as much as one does when good things happen.  It's all about communication and being honest.  There's a new buzz word for honesty these days - authenticity.   You'll hear business folks go on ad nauseam about it.  If one is being authentic, one is being honest, right? 

But when good things do happen to you or your business, or you're involved in innovative projects, there's nothing like a good, old-fashioned news release sent out to media to draw interest in an article, in addition to getting your message out with social media.

Here are a couple of places where you too might be able to reach a small, but targeted audience in this article.

My, What Lovely Fox Paws !

Yes, here I am committing a faux pas, or committing bad humor.  Which do you think dear reader?  Nonetheless, the PR blunder is the topic for this month's second post.  For most groups, organizations and companies, it's a question of when rather than ever having committed a PR blunder.  A small slip of the tongue near an open microphone, a mis-Tweet or what someone thought was a funny post on Facebook can turn around to slap you right in the face.  Cheap Shot Alert - Unless of course you're Charlie Sheen.

So is dealing with those kinds of mistakes any different in cyber space than in the physical world?  In a word, no.  The same things you would do here, you carry over to the social media sphere.  As a matter of fact, I think it's easier to react quickly, honestly and with humor in social media.

Thanks to my friends at Mashable for sharing this link to AMEX's forum for small businesses about recovering from a social media fox paw.

Future for Google+?

It was interesting to start a small conversation on Facebook yesterday about Google+.  While some of my more adventuresome friends are there, others who are very tech savvy are not.  This surprised me until I asked why.  The response was to wait until more people go there.  But if the tech savvy folks are waiting, then who will be there?

This is the dilemma for PR and Marketing folks as well.  Especially since there is no advertising on Google+ right now.  But just because there aren't any ads now, doesn't mean that will always be the case, so say the folks over at Mashable.


For PR purposes, I can see Google+ as being a place where you can post links to news releases that have made it on other websites.  I just did that with a small release I got out there for a group art show I'm in later this month.

My Pro Bono Work

Maybe I'm just a crazy lady, but I feel that everyone needs to help others - be it donating money to worthy causes, delivering meals on wheels to the elderly or in my case, helping groups and organizations with PR. 

Two years ago I was helping the artists who do the NadaDada Motel Art Festival in Reno, Nevada when I asked to see the news release so I could send it to my contacts.  Remember yesterday's post about going back to the basics - the 5 Ws?  That's what I did with the "release" that one of the artists sent me.  I just re-wrote in a more conventional journalistic style.  Then I thought, why not send it to the NY Times?  So I did and this time Fortuna smiled in my direction and we got a reporter out to the event and got a hit.

I don't know if I'll be as lucky (because really PR is just a toss of the die), but  hope I will for my next Pro Bono project for the Professional Women Photographers (PWP)  (http://www.facebook.com/ProfessionalWomenPhotographers) who is hosting a very interesting panel discussion at the School of Visual Arts in New York City that I hope I can attend.  I can't tell you much now, but some BIG name folks from the New Yorker magazine and the Yale School of Art are on tap.

If you're amazed that I've posted three times in one week, I'm flabbergasted!  But this post was triggered by an email from PWP trying to figure out a time for me to consult with them via speaker phone in the meeting.

Basics to Remember

At many times in one's professional life, it's always good to go back to the basics.  I think this is especially true in Public Relations.  There are times when even I first write out the Who, What, Where, When and Why of a release.  The Five Ws are really the place where PR and Journalism meet.

I'll never forget the several times that I would receive a photo from a PR agency when I was a radio journalist.  It gave me a few laughs and was great as an on air joke, but that release was headed straight for the round file. 

Seth Godin, a guru of marketing advice, has touched on some really good email etiquette in his latest blog post.  He also deals with some common sense basics that all PR folks need to keep remembering.  Thanks Seth for this community service.
 

Doing the Right Thing.

Sometimes PR professionals get too wrapped up in long range plans and promotions that they can't see the forest for the trees.  Sometimes the best PR is just to do the right thing.  Such was the case with a group of soldiers who had recently served in Afghanistan and were heading back home to their base camp. 

It's too bad the baggage person at Delta did not do the right thing, but clung rigidly to what they thought were the rules.  Come to find out they were wrong.  After all these men has just risked life and limb! 

Thanks to the folks at Mashable for bringing this to my attention.  The video has gone viral so you might have seen it by now.  Here's your link.

Happy New Year

Sorry it's been so long since the last post, but you know what the holidays will do to the most thoughtful plans - turn them into mincemeat pie!  But here we are again thinking about social media and public relations. 

On thing that might be helpful to you whether you do PR for other people or for your own endeavors, is to pick up a couple of copies of your local newspapers, daily and weekly.  Now, get out your laptop or just a chunk of paper and list the headlines of the feature articles, the reporter's name and a short synopsis of the story.  This is a great way to keep track of what people are writing about in the print world. 

You can also do this with your local news stations - TV of course since the news on radio is nonexistent these days due the FCC  having no power anymore.  But don't let me get up on that soapbox.

Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes

are about the only constant my friends.  It's amazing that I've been posting more to the PR blog than my art & life blog, Ann Tracy's Waiting for the Muse!  But I've stumbled upon some very interesting stuff that I did want to share with you.

Big thanks to my Twitter friend from Ireland - Saoire O' Brien for passing along this link to an article in Mashable about how Facebook is changing and morphing.  Granted they talk about it more in a marketing sense, but I think this is useful for PR as well.