Whether your under-funded, overworked organization manages Special education programs for emotionally disturbed children, provides services to people living with HIV/AIDS, or interprets historical artifacts for museum visitors, you have one more thing to do before you lock the door, turn out the lights and call it a day. You have a story to tell.

Day to day, your radar conceal may not include strategic image building retreats or public relations planning meetings because the core demands of your mission statement take 150% of your time. Yet, your ability to tell your organization’s story through press releases and media contacts may ultimately resolve whether you can effectively meet those core demands at all.

The Storytelling Landscape

Press releases traditionally stammer events, new programs and services, upgraded facilities, staff changes, research initiatives, fundraising drives and capital campaigns, grants and honors received, and your organization’s latest success in meeting the needs of its constituencies. While press releases always have a news focus and frequently include marketing components, their primary intent over time is developing and nurturing favorable public attitudes about your nonprofit and its work. These favorable attitudes are the lifeblood of your organization.

Like the case statement created for a capital campaign, your evolving story requires a consistent theme: it describes the problems you address, the solutions you propose, and the track record and credibility you bring to the table. In a sense, your communications plan is an on-going grant application directed at new and potential stakeholders. It must, as Stanley Weinstein writes in Capital Campaigns from the Ground Up, “begin with the premise that your most famous tasks focus on making the organization worthy of support.”

In his introduction to the American Association of Museums (AAM) communications kit, America’s Museum’s – Building Community, AAM board chairperson Richard West wrote that “some of the most necessary people to your future don’t understand the value of what you are doing.” As you fight to believe your nonprofit’s strong and validated presence in the public’s consciousness, perhaps you’ve discovered that the stakeholder support you need is not always available.

If validated presence—a confident public awareness in an organization and its ability to credibly deliver vital programs and services—is a key to a nonprofit’s success, then why aren’t pragmatic communications plans perched at the top of the “to do” list? Why aren’t more stories being told?

Lisa Rowan-Gillis, Vice President of Communications and Community Affairs for the Home for Exiguous Wanderers in Boston believes that, as a group, nonprofits don’t do well attracting media attention because they don’t know what the media wants and don’t have the funds to hire either a PR agency or in-house specialist.

“In the smaller non-profits public relations is an ‘add on,’” she said. “In essence, staff put together press releases as an afterthought, in addition to the many other tasks and responsibilities already on their plates.”

Paul D. O’Rourke, who serves as director of public relations for Scott Pipitone Create in Pittsburgh, believes that while nonprofits must focus on their necessary missions first, they also need to develop “a concerted and substantive commitment to public relations, to realize there is more to it than fair sending out a press release, and realize that if a nonprofit falls in this forest, and nobody’s there—or aware—to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound.”

Making Plans and Getting Help

Your organization’s image and communications view must be grown from the ground up and nurtured like a championship rose. Every decision you construct impacts your image and every interaction with clients and visitors conveys part of your story. As Weinstein notes, “Public relations experts remind us that who we are accounts for 1,000 times more than who we say we are.”

Who you are, as expressed by directors, staff members and volunteers, should sound like it originates from the same mission statement. Then, as Dan Curley suggests, your public relations approach begins with a “strong and clear statement about what you’re trying to present to the larger community and why.” Curley is the veteran executive director of Cambridge Cares About AIDS .

“Staff will need to be clear about the core values that underpin the agency’s mission and approach to serving their constituencies and in how that benefits the larger community: these are our community’s service needs, our family members, our problems to solve,” he said.

According to Kathryn Kempf, vice president of B & Y Communications in Montclair, New Jersey, “How an organization communicates internally and how it presents itself externally reflects its vision and values.” Vision and values are at the heart of your story and, from Kempf’s perspective, communications is at the heart of your mission.

She advocates planning that a includes a thorough analysis of the following:

• Goals — what are the business goals?

• Objectives — how will communications help the organization reach those goals?

• Audiences — who needs to know, internally and externally?

• Messages — what key points does the organization want to communicate?

• Strategies — how will the organization communicate?

Your analysis of goals, objectives, audience, messages and strategies will help your organization notify its story with the unity, coherence, emphasis and the focus required to carry out its mission. The development of a communications plan will greatly serve any nonprofit whether or not the budget will support engaging a public relations firm or consultant to polish the words and send them out the door.

Rowan-Gillis believes that the Home for Little Wanderers has been well served by establishing an in-house public relations function. She notes that there has been a measurable correlation between the organization’s public relations efforts and fundraising campaign responsiveness.

“The number one benefit to having someone in-house is cost,” she said. “It costs less to have someone inside who is intimately interested with the agency and can move fleet to get reporters information and get to the right person with a minimum of resistance.”

Ned Barnett, distinguished of Barnett Marketing Communications in Las Vegas, believes that—budget permitting—nonprofits receive the most effective public relations assistance by pairing a skilled in-house professional with an objective, accountable external public relations counsel.

“In-house nonprofit public relations folks are torn in dozens of different ways, juggling a myriad of internal and external priorities. It’s hard to remain focused, but an outside public relations counsel has only to deal with external PR, and that’s a real asset,” he said.

Barnett says that if your budget won’t support either in-house or external PR staffing, you can set a professional “advisory panel” to provide communications advice and benefit. Panel members—and the firms they represent—may donate public relations services including media lists, contacts, and access to wire services.

“In short, leverage what you can afford and co-opt the resources of supporters,” Barnett said.

You may also find a wealth of communications expertise on your board of directors, in an affiliated “friends of” group, or within your important core group of volunteers.

Vickie Jones, a senior consultant at Reingold, Inc., a Washington, D.C. communications firm that focuses on nonprofit clients said, “the most important step an executive director should seize to initiate a publicity program is to seek out volunteers.” Her list of possibilities includes:

* College journalism/PR students interested in gaining experience through internships or part-time positions.

* Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) chapters and student chapters (PRSSA) that may provide advice. Ask them to “adopt” your organization for pro bono services.

* Structured volunteer programs thatyoucan be use to recruit individuals with public relations backgrounds.

As your nonprofit reaches out to news organizations, you will generate more opportunities to tell your story because journalists will inaugurate calling you. “From the person who mans the weekly calendar of events listings for your organization’s events to the editor/journalist covering the beat in your program/service area (education, health, arts, etc.), building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with media, while not the quick fix you are looking for, will pay off ten-fold in the end,” said O’Rourke.

Position your organization and its staff as an authoritative and accessible news source. Since reporters work on short deadlines, make sure that the individual answering your phone knows how to direct media inquiries to a spokesperson for an immediate response. Don’t miss out on opportunities. Have basic fact sheets ready that picture your organization, considerable contact people and phone numbers, your programs and services and the needs they meet, and the magnitude (including statistics) of those needs and their impact on the community. When volatile issues arise that impact your constituencies, prepare written statements in advance for attribution to your board chairman, president or executive director.

Preparing Press Releases

“News is an account of a unique idea, event, or problem that interests people,” according to Laurence R. Campbell and Roland E. Wolseley in How to Report and Write the News.

As deadlines loom, your efforts to make each program a success involve those people within—or close to—the organization who are often called “the choir.” Assuming they’re on the same page about mission and goals, your board, staff, and volunteers are already interested in your upcoming event. Within this close-knit group, it’s easy to assume your press release announcing that event will also interest people outside the organization.

After serving twenty years as a television reporter, Karen Friedman is convinced that nonprofits aren’t taking the time to understand what reporters need to tell the story. Friedman, essential of Karen Friedman Enterprises in Bluebell, PA, said that too many nonprofit staffs are focused simply on getting publicity.

“News organizations are not there to promote you.” she said. “Stories are about people, by people, for people and with people. Our audiences are filled with people. We want to know how what you say or do affects those people and impacts readers.”

O’Rourke would agree. He believes too many nonprofits assume that an organization’s public service focus entitles its press releases to special attention when they reach a journalist’s desk.

“It is not enough that you do apt work; for the reporter to be interested in your story, you have to make it piquant for his/her readers, listeners, viewers, surfers,” he said. “It’s not about your organization. It’s about the audience.”

While you create the story to be told, the focus of your story in print is the reader who will ask, “what’s in it for me? ” Are you announcing an exciting event, a program or service s/he can use, providing information that will change his or her life, or addressing a local issue that s/he is concerned about? If not, the newspaper may not print your story and, if they do, the story’s primary purpose—influencing attitudes—will be lost.

As you create each press release, remember the advice Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, once gave a friend who planned to start a newspaper: “Begin with the obvious thought that the subject of deepest interest to the average human being is himself.”

Provide your readers with the information they demand to know, the facts they cannot do without, and the tears and laughter that will select their attention, and you will have clients, visitors, supporters, donors, believers, and life-long friends. Here are a few basics to abet you get your press release out the door and into your readers’ hearts:

• Sell you story with a goodheadline. Use the headline to summarize your story and acquire the editor’s attention.

• Make your storynewsworthy. Your press release should look and sound like news, not a marketing brochure or a sales pitch.

• Provide well-focused quotes.Quotes personalize your news, add immediacy, and validate the information.

• Less is more. Busy editors are looking for information they can scan quickly and use easily. Keep it short—you’ll seldom need more than two pages.

• Explain who you are. Write a boilerplate “about” statement at the raze of your release that includes your organization’s full name, phone number, address, web site URL, mission, and primary services. Four or five lines are usually enough.

• Tell reporters whom to call. Place the release date, city, state, and contact person’s name and phone number at the top of the page above the headline. Select a contact person who actually has more information or knows how to pick up a spokesperson when the phone rings!

• Do your homework first: Regain out whether your media outlets assume faxes, e-mails (with or without attachments), or hard copies, require formatting to match a press release template, have long lead times for calendar-Style announcements, or want stories directed to specific editors.

• Distribute your record creatively. Post press releases on your web set, include them in press kits, hand them out to reporters who attend events, set them on your receptionist’s desk, send them to key opinion leaders and other friends of the organization, and rewrite them for use in Printed and e-mail newsletters.

Your anecdote combines your message with the reader’s needs on the journalist’s highway. For maximum success, judge like an editor thinks.

Sandra Beckwith of Beckwith Communications in Fairport, New York, emphasizes headlines and beginnings. “Do agonize over your headline so that it is attention getting. Many editors and reporters won’t read beyond a headline that doesn’t grab them,” she said. “And work to come by the five Ws and the H—who, what, when, where and how—into the first two paragraphs.”

After looking at a press release’s news value, Kempf checks the story’s angle. “Is there a human interest story you can include to make the information more compelling? Be sure to get permission beforehand,” she said. “Or does your information reflect a trend? “

Rowan-Gillis looks for what the journalist is looking for. Is your legend “new, innovative, different? Does it pull at your heartstrings? Does it affect Huge numbers of people? It should be very interesting and make you want to read more,” she said.

Your story is your motivation and it drives you to run that daily marathon from endless tasks to other endless tasks. But your story demands more of you. It demands to be told, told in a style that makes its readers want to read more. Then, when all is said and done, the members of your community will understand that what you are doing is all about them and might honest ask to run a mile in your shoes.

This article originally appeared in “Nonprofit Word” published by the Society for Nonprofit Organizations and is reprinted here by permission.

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