Developing A Media Relations Strategy

A media strategy helps organisations to plan and deliver tactics to achieve promotion and increased awareness in the media.

With limited time, money and resources, charities and purpose driven organisations can really benefit from having a detailed strategy to understand what they want to get from their media relations and the most effective route to achieving it.?

So, where do you start? We have listed our key recommendations that should form the basis of every charity and purpose led organisation's media strategy.

1. Set clear and measurable objectives

First and foremost, define what you want to achieve with your media relations work by setting our clear and measurable objectives. We always ask new clients to really define what they want to achieve with their comms activity up front so that we can refer back to it when implementing the work. It’s also essential for evaluating activity at a later date.?

Ensure your objectives are SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. SMART goals will ensure your efforts are focused, that you are maximising your resources, and therefore increasing your chances of achieving them.?

Make sure you objectives are tangible. For example, instead of saying we would like to see an increase in donations, you could define this as an “increase in donations by 35% by the end of September”.

2. Define your target audience.

Before implementing your media strategy, ensure you have conducted thorough research on the people you want to reach. Think about who is affected by the issues you are trying to raise awareness for, and who your organisation appeals to.?

Where budgets are limited, you can use useful tools such as google analytics and social media analytics, to show who is visiting your website and media platforms. This will tell you more about your audience demographics and what their interests are.?

3. Draft your media messages

Setting clear key messages are pivotal to the formation of a media strategy. We recommend turning your generic campaign messages, if available, into messages that are relevant for the media.?

Marketing messages tend to be more jargon driven, and written in the first person. While media messages are more factual and informative and written in the third person, like how you would write a press release.

Draft 5 or 6 key primary messages for each campaign, one of which should be your call to action, i.e. what do you want your audience to do on the back of seeing or hearing your messages, for example visit the website, sign up, donate etc. We then recommend drafting more tailored messages for the different elements of the campaign, such as those for research, stats, and/or on the charity’s aims for the campaign.

4. Establish your media content

Once you have established what you would like to communicate and who to, you will need to create engaging content that the media will be interested in.

This could include strong case studies of people affected by the issue you are bringing attention to. What better way to communicate the core values of your organisation, than through the personal experiences of those who benefit??

Creating an expert opinion is also key. Think about the key talking points your spokespeople can provide an opinion on. This will help determine your different media angles or hooks, which you can pitch as opinion articles (op-eds). Other content can include surveys into the public’s opinion for example, or new research and stats that your organisation has led on.

5. Create your media targets

Next up is putting together a list of key media targets. Look at the content you have and determine which media it best fits with. We recommend splitting this up by media type i.e. broadcast, print, online then by national and regional media and including trade or specialist media titles, if relevant. Then list the key titles within these categories that you wish to target.

6. Include timelines and deadlines

Ensure that you are including a timeframe within your strategy on what will be issued and when. Bear in mind the different media lead-times, and that monthlies work 3-4 months in advance, weekly titles 6-8 weeks, while daily newspapers and onlines are a lot more immediate.?

If you are launching something on a specific date or working with an awareness day you may want to stagger your media relations working back from long leads to shorter lead media so that it all hits at the same time. This is when a media timeline works well, to illustrate the timings of the media work and when coverage is expected to land.?

7. Monitor performance indicators

Monitoring performance indicators will help you evaluate your strategy. We suggest setting a few key, achievable targets such as the following:

• Number of pieces of coverage, set an ambitious but achievable figure that spans the different types of media you are targeting, i.e. x number of consumer print items, x number of broadcast items, then trade titles and so on.
• Set a target of the percentage of coverage that will include your campaign key messages. We recommend setting a target around your top three key messages and making your call to action as key message 1 and aiming for a percentage of coverage to include this, then setting a lower target for key message 2, then lower for message 3, etc.
• Finally set a tangible outcome that you would like to see on the back of your media work. Outcomes can be harder to measure and difficult to attribute to media work alone; however if your project is integrated then the outcomes are likely to be achieved through a variety of methods, including social media etc which you can also set a target for. Example outcomes can be driving traffic to your website, driving fundraising sign ups, and/or increasing donations.