How to get Internal Coverage for Change

Selling in a story to editors and journalists, even when they work on your company magazine, can seem daunting.

Yet your internal publications and intranet are great channels for explaining change. It is likely the editor has lots of other programme teams also wanting coverage, here are some tips to help you present your change programme in ways that pique their interest and persuade them to give you space.

Identifying news value

A story has news value if readers and listeners will be interested. The trick is to start by thinking of your change from the perspective of their readers - and listeners if they produce videos and audio podcasts.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Who are their primary readers? Perhaps engineers, scientists, customer service advisers, sales people, customers, pensioners.
• Do these readers prefer factual detail, background, human interest stories, humour, words, images, video or audio?
• What do they most want to know about your change?

Hopefully, as you consider these questions you are realising that different audiences have different interests and different information needs.

Approaching the editor

Once you are clear on your audiences and the best internal channels to reach them, you are ready to approach the gatekeepers for these channels. They are likely to be in your company’s employee communication or customer communication teams.

They will be persuaded to cover your change programme when you convince them it is relevant to their readers, listeners, and viewers. Thus it helps to be clear yourself.

Here are some questions to help you uncover the relevance:

• Who will be impacted by the change? Perhaps changing the way they work?
• When will they be changing?
• Why will they be changing?
• How will this improve the way they work? The way they serve customers? The way the organisation responds to changes in its marketplace?

Using a precis will help you structure your story idea so editors and journalists can easily understand what you are proposing. You may even find they research and write the story for you, asking you to comment and clear their copy.

Have fun approaching your internal editors, and do let me know how you get on.