As with any kind of advocacy, media work requires time, commitment and strategic thinking. To best get your messages out there, you’ll need to map out a communications plan. This section will help you to develop a communications plan to help you meet your organization’s advocacy goals.

UNDERSTANDING THE PURPOSE OF A COMMUNICATIONS PLAN

Communications work is not just a way to publicize an event or advertise your work in the media—it can also help you reach your programmatic goals. Media work is a way to engage the public and can work hand in hand with other organizing strategies, such as lobbying or door knocking. A good communications plan can help you participate in media conversations on your issues and deliver messages that can be repeated in classrooms, churches and dinner table conversations.

As you draft a communications plan, remember that your goal is not just to get reporters to show up to press conferences or to write stories about the work you’re doing. Your plan should focus on the ways your organization can work with the media to educate and inform the public. As you develop your plan, keep these goals in mind as a way of thinking broadly about how individual strategies fit into a larger objective.

EVALUATE YOUR PAST COMMUNICATIONS WORK

As you begin planning, take a look at your communications wins in the past and your current
reputation with the media. Think about the goals of your organization and how you might be able to use media to more effectively reach those goals.

Begin by taking a look at your previous media accomplishments. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Has your outreach to the media helped you achieve your goals?

• Have you expanded your base or the audience for your issues?

• Have your messages helped to change the conversation about a particular issue?

• What are your biggest media-related accomplishments and setbacks? How can you use them to take stock of the resources you have and the ways to most effectively use them?

• How do the media cover you now?

• What is your reputation with the media outlets you’ve worked with in the past?

• Why do media outlets call you? If they call you only in certain circumstances, do you want to expand your communications to cover more issues?

• To whom do they speak when they request a spokesperson? Do media outlets always seek quotes from your executive director or a local “star spokesperson?” Do you want to expand your communication with the media to more departments, your entire organization or a larger base of community spokespeople?

• How can you change your organization’s current interactions with the media to strengthen your credibility, increase your visibility and expand your communications efforts?

ASSESS YOUR CAPACITY

Now that you’ve looked at your past media work, the next step is to look at your budget and personnel resources and how they can be used to meet your communications goals.

Do you have any staff that you can commit to communications work full-time? If not, do you have any staff who might be able to take on communications work on a part-time basis?

Communications work is not always intuitive and requires both experience with and understanding of the media. If your staff does not have experience with communications work, have them attend media trainings and take professional development courses. Organizations like glaad and the SPIN Project provide these types of classes and workshops.

Ask yourself if you have the resources, financial and otherwise, to build an effective communications plan. Media outreach only works well if your communications staff is available and can be reached by the media whether you’re in the office or traveling. Make sure you can commit money to information technology resources, graphic design, mailings, publications, press kits, website development and other components that will help you to get your messages out there. You won’t be able to start with everything right away, but as you build up your communications work you’ll want to be sure you have the resources to keep it growing.

If you don’t have the resources to devote to a communications plan, look for fundraising or grant opportunities to expand your budget for communications work. Remember that you should expect to devote at least 30% of your budget in order for your media work to really make an impact. As you develop your communications plan, remember that good media work helps you to serve your development goals. If you can show the ways that your messages have helped to move public opinion to foundations or potential donors, you’ll have a great new way to sell your work.

DEVELOPING A COMMUNICATIONS PLAN

After you review your available resources, you can start to make a concrete communications plan. Remember, communications work takes time to develop – you do not need to do everything at once to get things moving.

Analyze Current Coverage: Do some research to see how your issues are being covered. Take a look at the frequency, accuracy and quality of reporting on your issues. You’ll notice certain trends and patterns that will help you shape your goals and develop your messages.

Set Your Goals: Think about what you want to gain through your communications work. Are you seeking heightened visibility for your organization? Increased awareness about the needs of your base? Pressure on a politician, lobbying group or another organization? Frame your goals as part of a positive vision for the future.

Target Your Audience: Think about whom you need to reach to meet your goals. For a short-term goal, you may want to just focus on mobilizing your community around a particular piece of legislation. You may also want to think about longer, more abstract goals, which may assume that a certain amount of social change has to happen before the goals can be reached. If you think about whom you want to reach and how this fits into your goals, you can better determine the concrete steps you need to take to reach the right audience.

Frame the Issue: Focus on core principles that will both resonate with journalists and connect to the audiences you want to reach. Present your issues in a way that appeals to your base, expands your audience and has enough compelling hooks to interest journalists. More information on message development and framing appears in Chapter IV.

Discipline the Message: Make your messages to the general public succinct and focused. Be clear about your goals and distill your mission into concise language that speaks to shared values. Include specific courses of action that can encourage people to make a difference in your larger cause.

Media Tactics: Think about the best way to reach your audience. Build your media list, target journalists to build relationships with and pitch stories to, plan events that will interest the press, offer yourself as a resource for stories and schedule interviews with media outlets.

Analyze Your Progress: At every step of the way, you’ll want to track the growth of your influence. This will take time, and progress can be frustratingly slow, even with a full-time commitment to communications work. Over time, you will build relationships with reporters and gain the trust of news outlets as a valued source of information. Track your media hits to measure your progress, think of new strategies and rework your message as necessary.

THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATIONS STAFF

A communications staff should have an understanding of current and recent coverage and be prepared to both respond to and initiate media coverage of your organization and your issues.

Monitor: A communications staff monitors media coverage of issues relevant to the organization. Simply conducting Internet news searches will help you get a sense of how stories are being written. If you have more resources, paid databases like LexisNexis can provide a more comprehensive way to monitor coverage.

Track: A communications staff should carefully track media coverage of your organization. As you build a database of stories, you can see trends in reporting and how coverage evolves even over a short period of time. Once you have a base of knowledge about who covers your issues and how your issues are covered, you’ll be better equipped to make informed decisions about the best way to respond to individual stories. As your organization and spokespeople begin to earn media hits, tracking successfully pitched stories or placed spokespeople will help you evaluate your progress.

Respond: A communications staff is there to respond to the media, and your team should be ready to let reporters know when they’ve produced fair coverage or reports that misrepresent your community or organization. It’s best to take the initiative to offer yourself as a resource and give reporters or editors information on how they can improve in the future. In instances where the coverage is routinely defamatory, this may not be possible, but your communications staff will do their best work if they focus on cultivating relationships rather than just reacting. It’s important to commend reporters who produce responsible coverage, and to let reporters who have made a good faith effort but missed the mark know how they can improve in the future.

Initiate: Your communications staff should initiate contact with the media to pitch stories about your organization and issues. You’ll need to be proactive about letting media outlets know when important events or stories related to your work happen. You need to be seen as a source of news, whether you’re holding a press conference or event, or pitching a story or giving a quote to a reporter. Your communications team should be ready to write media releases, provide quotes and make pitches to reporters and editors across different media formats.

MONITORING THE MEDIA

Monitoring news coverage plays a key role in media work. Familiarity with reporting on your issue will help you develop more effective messages and will strengthen your advocacy efforts with individual media outlets.

Monitoring is not simply reading the news—it’s reading between the lines to understand how a certain issue is being covered. When monitoring the media, it’s important to carefully examine the order in which the information is presented, what facts or pieces of evidence are included or omitted and which spokespeople are or are not quoted.

At first glance, these details may not be immediately obvious, but the problem becomes apparent with a closer look. In many cases, the journalistic impulse to create so-called “balance” leads to situations in which arguments that have no relation to the story end up being included in news coverage. Over time, you’ll begin to see this and other trends in style and content that will help you to advocate for better coverage and tailor your messages more effectively. Look for resources at the end of the book for monitoring the media.

BUILDING A MEDIA LIST

A media list is a detailed list of contacts at press outlets that have covered your issues or that you want to pitch in the future. A communications plan is not feasible if you don’t have a good media list – if you have trouble getting started, contact glaad for assistance gathering press contacts in your region.
When building a media list, you first have to determine whom you want to reach and where they get their information – you won’t be able to develop relationships at every press outlet right away, so be strategic about whom you approach initially. Once you’ve determined the proper outlets to contact, find out which reporters cover your issues. Often you can find this information from Bacon’s or other media databases, on the outlet’s website or by calling the organization.

Develop a spreadsheet with all of the relevant information you’ll need for press contacts: name, phone number, fax number and email address are most important. From there you can add address, circulation, beat and other relevant details that will help you decide where, when and how to send materials.

It’s worthwhile to include a column on your spreadsheet that tracks your contact with that particular outlet – that way you can track how often you’re in touch with a given outlet and have your most recent communication readily accessible when you contact them again.

When figuring out whom to contact when a specific story arises, you want to have as much breadth as possible while at the same time tailoring your pitch and supplemental materials appropriately for each individual outlet. For instance, you won’t want to send the same materials to a daily newspaper that you would to a local TV station.

Make sure to narrow your list of contacts so you’re not contacting people in the same department at the same press outlet – while it may be useful in some instances to reach out to multiple reporters or departments at the same press outlet, it can also be considered annoying.

The most important thing to do is build professional relationships with reporters. This is an ongoing process, since there will be regular staff changes at any media outlet. Once you have an established rapport with a particular organization, you’ll easily be able to handle these transitions. Making good-faith efforts to cultivate relationships by holding lunch or coffee meetings can help get your foot in the door and determine the most effective way to get information to a reporter—some prefer a short pitch sent via email, while others may prefer a full press release every time. As you get familiar with different outlets, you’ll be able to determine the most effective ways to pitch to individual reporters.