Post Election Findings for Association PR and Content Pros

In the din of the 2024 post-election analysis, pundits will rightly be scrutinizing social and demographic trends, kneading the minutiae of the campaign and trying to understand what happened and why.

For those of us in the PR and content profession working for associations, some clear trends have emerged from the campaign that may have relevance and meaning for us. Other trends that began prior to the election have accelerated and may be more prominent in 2025.

Podcasts have been ascendant for some time, and the campaign made that even more clear. Both candidates appeared on podcasts that were not on the national radar four years ago. “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “Call Her Daddy” gained prominence in this cycle because campaigns realized they were both excellent vehicles to reach audiences that have long canceled their newspaper subscriptions. These outlets achieve two goals: they help you reach a more narrow audience that might be ignored by other outlets, and the podcasts themselves actually get covered by mainstream media — a win-win for the savvy guests who appear.

Your association vertical audience likely listens to a podcast or follows a blog that serves your audience. If you have not introduced yourself to these hosts, today is a great day to start. Take them seriously and treat them like journalists. Cision, the respected media and PR platform, has recommended this for years.

The continuing shrinking of local and regional media makes the news hole so small that for many organizations, there is no room for association news in your market. For those of you smart enough to have seen this coming years ago, you started an association blog to showcase your announcements. For those of you late to that party, today is still a good time to start a blog. You may consider building in SEO-friendly features so these blog posts get picked up by Google.

It may help to re-examine your perception of what a journalist is. In 2024, our client provided press passes to an engineering student who created content on her social media account promoting the client’s annual conference. Chinese journalists partnered with another one of our clients to create unique international content that was promoted on Chinese social media.

In 2017, national newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post experienced significant subscription increases as citizens surprised by Donald Trump’s win sought explanations from these legacy media outlets. Will those newspapers see a similar bump in 2025? If they don’t, the influence of these media will continue to wane as more subscribers abandon them and blame them for enabling Trump’s re-election.

In 2009, then Mayo Clinic PR Guru Lee Aase urged PR professionals to stop courting the media and focus on “being the media.” Create your own stories and your own content, and your audience will find you. In 2025, that advice still holds. With media outlets consolidating, news holes closing, and staff shrinking, there are fewer and fewer traditional outlets for your news. But smart content pros can quickly re-calculate and take a fresh look at the media landscape that now surrounds them and make it work for their association.