Charity PR €˜must buy-in to fundraising'
Howard Lake | 8 November 2006 | News
Fundraising is way down the list of priorities for most charity PR departments, and we need to get our PR people to ‘buy-in’ to fundraising to raise the profile and attract more media coverage.
Turner PR’s account director Ian MacQuillin said at yesterday’s IoF conference on Fundraising PR and Communications, that he had been shocked in the five years he edited Professional Fundraising magazine to find that PR departments not only found the trade press for fundraising unimportant, but that they seemed to see the fundraising function itself as un-newsworthy.
Fundraising is not the ugly duckling you have to get out of the way before you can promote a celebrity and her latest PR venture, he told delegates.
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You should make the most of the trade press, he said. Trade press is ‘onside’ and it lays the foundations for national, consumer and broadcast coverage. Stories in the trade press do filter through to the national press.
The best way to attract a journalist’s attention, apart from building up a good relationship with them, is to make sure in your press releases you have a clear sell in the first paragraph and a good headline. You have seven seconds to convince a journalist they want to use your press release, MacQuillin said, as this is the amount of time a journalist spends scanning a press release that lands on their desk before they decide whether to use it or spike it.
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.