Some advice to PR agencies
Howard Lake | 18 February 2005 | News
Professional Fundraising magazine and UK Fundraising recently lamented the poor quality of charities’ fundraising PR, at least to the trade press. It seems that there is little sign of improvement.
UK Fundraising thrives on receiving useful tips and news releases from fundraisers, fundraising agencies and their PR colleagues, whether in-house or at an external agency. However, we find the overall quality of their work to be poor. Worse, some of them clearly don’t actually read this publication which they try so hard to get their clients featured in.
UK Fundraising echoed Professional Fundraising magazine’s lament of the state of the fundraising press release back in September 2004. We also added our own recommendations on how charities’ fundraising PR people could help us help their clients.
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While some have acted on it, many haven’t, so we are once again requesting the following from PR staff and agencies:
- never telephone us to check if your email has been received. “Did you get my email?” is the kind of call that just annoys us and wastes our time. Undelivered emails almost always bounce back to the sender: check your inbox before telephoning us and charging your charity client for the service.
- never email us a press release and then send a paper copy in the post a few days later. UK Fundraising has only ever published online: we much prefer emailed news releases and we have a dislike of waste and duplication, especially when charities are footing the bill.
- avoid posting us graphics on a CD. We dislike waste: email us your graphic, or publish it on a website so that we can choose to download it. Don’t charge charities for unnecessary CDs on our account.
- don’t follow up an emailed press release with a phone call: that simply repeats the function of the press release, but costs your charity client more money. Perhaps we are an unusual publisher, but we almost always let people know whether we have used their news release, when it went live, and where they can view it.
- avoid sending dull photos: outsize cheque handovers, even by a celebrity, just don’t excite us or our readers.
- avoid sending us near pro-forma news releases. We see a lot of them, so some kind of creativity usually lifts the chances of a news release making it onto our site.
- don’t forget to include a web address for your charity or charity client. We like to link to the charity’s website at the end of a news item, and we often visit the site to find more context for a news item. What we don’t find helpful is no web link in a news release or – worse – the PR agency’s web address and not that of their charity client.
To those professional PR agencies that send us well-crafted, well-timed and interesting news items – thank you: you know you’re not included in this call to action. To everyone else, and to the charities that pay for this level of service, please ponder these suggestions. Assuming you’re actually reading this, and not just blasting us with all your charity news releases because you found us on Media Disk…
Of course, if there’s anything UK Fundraising can do to make fundraising PR people’s task easier, let us know.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.