Tips for Promoting Your Summit to and Working with the News Media

Traditional news media coverage remains one of the most effective ways to raise awareness of an issue or an event. News stories help share your message with an audience that is broader than your attendee base and as a result canhelp build community interest in your work and recruit additional partners to support it. All GradNation Community Summits are open to the news media. Below are some tips on how you can use the template media materials in this toolkit to promote your Summit to the media and work with them to cover not just the Summit but your work long term.

Create a Media List

Some of you may already have good relationships with your local media. Whether you work with them regularly or not at all, one of the keys to successful promotion of this event will be connecting with the right reporters. One of the best ways to do this is to build an effective media list. To do this, you will want to first identify the media outlets and reporters that may have covered your organization in the past or that typically cover the issues that will be addressed at the Summit. A good place to start is with education reporters. If you don’t already know who these reporters are, you can easily find out by scanning your local newspapers for recent education coverage or calling the paper directly to ask.

In addition to education reporters, you’ll want to include reporters who cover community, family/parenting, business or philanthropy since all these topics will be addressed in some way at the Summit. You’ll want to also include the editorial pages, relevant columnists and photography divisions of local print news outlets as they often cover these issues. Radio and television reporters tend to be more general assignment, so if you don’t already know who the best reporter or producer is at your local stations, the best place to start is with the planning and assignment news desks. They will be able to direct you to the most appropriate reporter or producer.

For each of these contacts, you will need the name, phone number and email address. Compile them into one large list that you can refer to regularly and update accordingly as you complete your outreach.

Complete and Distribute Your Template Media Advisory and Press Release

To help you with your overall promotional efforts, a template mediaadvisory and press release have been developed that can be customized for your Summit. We have left placeholders for your specific local information and provided a supportive quote from America’s Promise President and CEO John Gomperts in the press release.

For easiest distribution of both the advisory and press release, we recommend email. Email is the fastest and most effective way to share this information with journalists. We also recommend that you paste the advisory into the body of the email as that avoids the spam filter trap caused by attachments.

You should plan your first distribution of the media advisory 3-4 days in advance of the Summit. The one exception is if your Summit falls on a Monday or Tuesday. If that’s the case, then your first distribution should be 5-6 days ahead so you can avoid the weekend slow down.

The advisory should be sent out again via email the day before the Summit (if your Summit falls on a Monday, send this on a Friday). Thesecond (and final) time you send out the advisory, you will want to change the subject line of the email to include the word “tomorrow” to give the email some urgency for the reporterreceiving it. The advisory should come from the person who is in charge of publicity for the Summit for to ensure efficiency and timeliness in terms of monitoring and response.

Your press release is best distributed the morning of the Summit. This will not only serve as a reminder of the event again but will provide background for news outlets not able to attend in person but who may still want to write something short for their online or print publication and can do so from the release. You should also plan to print copies of the press release to bring to the Summit and distribute copies to all the reporters who do attend as they may not see it in their emails right away.

Follow Up with Reporters

Any reporters who respond to your initial advisory emails should receive a reply from you within 24 hours, no exceptions. For those reporters you don’t hear back from immediately, place a follow-up call the day after you send the event advisory. Late morning, around 10:30 or 11:00 a.m. is often a good time to call reporters. They havealready had their daily planning meetings and it is before they get deeply involved inother stories.Reporters do not have a lot of time to talk on the phone. You will have only a fewminutes to get their attention and capture their interest. Make certain you are ready to share with the reporter the who, what, where, when and why of the Summit with the ask that you’d love to have them join you. Do not call simply to ask if theyreceived your email. Depending on the media market, reporters can get dozens of advisories a day and may not remember yours. If this this case, offer to send the advisory again.

There is a special exception here for television and radio reporters. Given the turnaround on news stories is shorter, planning decisions around story assignment and crew allocation are often made the day before or morning of. Keep this in mind should you connect with an assignment or planning editor at your local stations and they are unable to commit to coverage at that time. The day before follow up with the advisory and personal phone calls for these folks will be especially crucial.

To help further prepare you to communicate with the media, your Summit promotional toolkit also includes a national graduation rates data fact sheet (that you can customize with your local data) and informational one-pagers on America’s Promise Alliance, the GradNation Community Summits and the GradNation Campaign. These materials can be used to help prepare you and your spokespeople to talk with the media or shared as part of your Summit general information and/or media kits.

Pitching Tips

  • If the reporter you call is not interested or on another beat, ask whom he/sherecommends you speak with instead.
  • If you are pitching more than one reporter at a news outlet, let them know.
  • If you get voicemail, leave a message with the basic information, letting them know that if you don’t hear back from them within 24-48 hours, you’ll follow up again.

Track Your Efforts and Collect Clips

We encourage you to track all your conversations with reporters over the course of your Summit promotional efforts. Some reporters may not cover the Summit but will be interested in the action plan that is developed or other work that spawns from the event for future stories. Capturing this information is useful for generating long term coverage of your community’s efforts.You have worked hard, so last but not least, please collect clips of any coverage that appears to share with partners and America’s Promise Alliance so we can celebrate your success!