Should they be waiting for the media to come to them? What are the stories that will capture the imagination of journalists? Are they responding in a timely way to media enquiries? All these are the day-to-day dilemmas facing charities when trying to navigate their PR strategy.

Not only are charities competing for their place within a packed media agenda, they’re also working in an increasingly busy market space, and it’s normally the big name charities with the time and budget to throw at PR that are able to make their voice heard above the crowd.

However, with a bit of PR savvy, even the smallest charity can box clever to get their stories out there, whether they want to build a national profile or reach a local audience of supporters.
At its heart, PR is all about good storytelling and what all charities have in their armoury are amazing stories just waiting to be told!

With this in mind, here are my top 5 tips to charity PR success.

Get social

Social media has enabled charities to directly communicate with their audiences and, when used properly, it also provides a great opportunity to start building relationships with journalists.
Take time to make sure that you’re following relevant local and national journalists on Twitter, as well as other influencers who can help you to spread the word.
Keep a daily eye out about what these people are talking about and make sure you respond when you think you have something valid to add. You’ll soon find that they start coming back to you for your opinion when they’re working on an article relevant to your charity. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship!
Use Hootsuite to monitor hashtags and keywords, so you can be ahead of the game when it comes to spotting trends in conversations that your charity should be part of.

Think like a journalist

With journalists increasingly unable to leave their offices due to a lack of staff, becoming your own reporter will help you give them the stories they need, making you a valuable contact.
If you’re regularly out and about as part of your work, take your trusty phone and record video interviews or take high resolution photographs.
Send the links to journalists as soon as you can and, more often than not, you’ll be amazed by how regularly they’ll use your content as long as its relevant and interesting. Making journalists lives easier will always work in your favour!

Comment on existing articles

Nowadays, every newspaper gives people the opportunity to comment on articles and blogs published on their sites. This provides charities with a free platform to share their work and views, raising their profile at the same time.
Using the comments section not only gives you a free platform to talk about your work, it can also help you to start building a relationship with the person who wrote the article, putting you at forefront of mind next time they need to speak to somebody about an issue connected to the work done by your charity.

Know your media

Try to dedicate 10 minutes each day to looking at what’s going on in the world of news and current affairs. Keeping at the forefront of the media agenda with an eye to potential angles for getting your charity featured will help you respond rapidly to opportunities.
From Woman’s Hour to Eastenders, there will always be new and emerging stories that you can tap into if you’re paying attention!
When you spot something, call the relevant contact and offer somebody from the charity as a spokesperson or commentator. Once again, you’re making their job easier and raising the charity’s profile at the same time!

Plan your stories

All charities have great stories to tell, but sometimes they can get missed because people are too close to see the wood for the trees.
As important as supermarket collections or raffles might be for bringing the money in, is that really what will excite the media and your potential future supporters?
Think about what is truly emotive about what you do and how you can illustrate that in a clear and impactful way.

Getting staff, volunteers and (if possible) a trusted media contact together for an ideas session and you could be surprised how differently you begin to think about what it is you want to say about your charity.

Sarah Brownless is founder of Trumpet PR and gtcreate’s PR and copywriting partner.

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The package, which has been developed as a result of significant experience in the industry, sees the agency offering a bespoke and powerful online solution that will meet the needs of recruitment agencies far and wide.

With prices starting at £4,995, the comprehensive package offers a search engine optimised website, featuring a powerful job search, social media integration and up to 8 different page templates, all wrapped up in your own bespoke, high quality design.

An example site is available to view at www.foresightsolutions.co.uk

To find out more please contact Clare on 01925 428 700 or email hello@gtcreate.co.uk

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I’m Zaid Crowe – gtcreate’s senior developer. My background is in LAMP  stack development predominantly, but I’ve turned my hand to most online technologies in the 15 years I’ve been programming for the web.My foray into LAMP development was spurred by my discovery of open source software  as a broke student, which empowered me to build web sites and applications rapidly, securely, scalably and cost effectively.

In this post, I’m going to be talking about one of my favourite pieces of open source software; our content management system of choice: CMS Made Simple www.cmsmadesimple.org

CMS Made Simple projects I’ve worked on recently

We’ve created a wide range of both websites and web applications using CMS Made Simple (CMSMS). One of our most recent projects is the design & build of a website for Manchester-based PR agency, Social Public Relations - http://www.social-pr.co.uk. This website really gave us the opportunity to leverage the platform to its full potential. Social PR boasts a highly fluid and dynamic design that needed to be translated faithfully into a system where our client could update and maintain, without any risk of breaking the sites layout. It also needed to be built FAST – with a deadline of 4 weeks.

Advantages of using CMS Made Simple

A problem that usually becomes the gripe of both the designer and developer is keeping the final website faithful to the design. CMSMS allows us to deliver the desired effects of both – to the highest level. CMSMS is actually an amalgamation of several other well known open source projects bundled together. One of these is “Smarty” http://www.smarty.net/, a template engine that allows us to take any HTML (we like to make sure ours is SEO optimised, semantically beautiful and light weight) and “inject it” into the CMS.

Smarty allows us to separate the logic that makes a website “function”, from the code that formats the resulting out put.  In the context of CMSMS this means we have total control of the HTML code we produce. Believe it or not, this is considered a luxury amongst the biggest open source CMS systems (Joomla, Drupal & WordPress) and is why some of the sites powered by these systems can appear a little similar, or form has to suffer in order to deliver function.

The other big factor for us – is the ability to add truly unique functionality to the system in the absence of any modules being available to do the job.  CMSMS allows us to rapidly build bespoke code that we can hook into Smarty, leaving the core CMS upgradeable and unmodified.

The future of CMSMS – how it can get better

CMSMS has a great development team behind it, not in the least because we are a part of it On a serious note, the last 3 versions have seen major leaps forward in terms of its performance – as one particularly important and competitive factor, is that the CMSMS team can respond to whatever the market needs at the time. Such as incorporating built in mobile optimised capabilities – including a fully mobile responsive control panel and also a focus on cleaning up it’s module repository to allow us to find modules faster, and at a higher quality.

Where’s next for the platform? 

Well, the web is evolving all the time so it’s been great to see the CMSMS team embrace mobile, I know that there’s a constant strive to consolidate and simplify the end user experience at all times and documentation is always an ongoing task. In short – the sky’s the limit.

 Zaid Crowe is Senior Developer at gtcreate

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The birthday social will have free drinks, kindly sponsored by Wesleyan for Lawyers. We’ll be there also, so be sure to book your place and say hello!

To secure your place, rsvp to admin@cnwypg.co.uk by close of business Friday 24^th May.

The CNWYPG is an exciting and vibrant networking group created by young professionals for the benefit of other ambitious and enthusiastic young professionals. The aim of the group is to provide an invaluable platform to enable on-going networking opportunities and mutual support, allowing members to develop, expand and amplify their own networks across all professions. There is also a strong focus on having fun! The group does not have an age limit and is designed for professionals new to their role and/or those who consider themselves to be young at heart!

Viv is Client Services Assistant at gtcreate

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The Palmyra will be hosting the event in their Parlour, where they’ll be screening a number of short films. According to the event’s organiser, @graemegoulden – there’ll be an “interesting announcement” and the promise that there’s a chance to get our hands on something shiny…The magpie in us is intrigued!

There’ll also be a talk with local director / screen writer & short-film producer, Michael Lacey. He’s currently a director for Emmerdale (Viv is a massive fan of Emmerdale so she’s extremely excited about this).

If any budding short film producers / directors would like to show their work, get in touch with Graeme at graemegoulden@gmail.com and he’ll make sure your work finds its way onto the big screen!

The event will take place at 7pm, Thursday 30^th May, 2013.

Find out more about the event here.

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First up was Insiders North West Young Professionals Awards. Dressed up to the nines, we headed to Salford’s Lowry Hotel. Introductions were made, food was inhaled and nerves settled in. The awards began. We waited in anticipation for the Marketing & Media Professional category to come up. Then lo and behold from a total of 25 nominations and a shortlist of 7, Clare bagged the hard-fought award! We were sat right at the back of the room, which made for the longest ever journey to the stage for Clare, and gave the rest of us plenty of time to celebrate.

Speaking about her success, Clare said: “I am absolutely ecstatic to have received this award. There are lots of awards out there, but this one represents the views of the North West business community – our client base – so I am extremely proud.”

We celebrated until the wee small hours, even sharing some banter with Dragon’s Den judges Peter Jones and Piers Linney. Two seriously lovely guys who had a lot of time for some slightly tipsy gtcreater’s.

Two weeks later we were at The Point at Lancashire County Cricket Club, hoping to repeat our earlier success, at the Prolific North Awards – which celebrate the best in class in the creative industries from across the North of England. Alas, it was not to be. We were pipped to the post by new start Manchester PR agency Rule 5. Well done guys!

Needless to say we still enjoyed the evening, which was rounded off nicely by a set from Manchester DJ Clint Boon. Judging by the photos, we all had a very good time.

Read more about Clare’s award win here.

The post You win some, you lose some! appeared first on gtcreate.

Zaid

Omnifocus. Calling it a to-do list is a massive understatement. Organiser of my life. Keeper of my sanity. GTD on steroids. It’s like my mum but in the form of an app.

Viv

Aside from the usual favourites, Twitter, Scribblenauts, *coughs* – theDailyMailapp.  I’m loving Feedly this month. It’s basically a newsreader that “helps you find news you care about”. So obviously, mine consists of blogging, cooking and design. The interface is simple, it pulls through all the best, relevant content from my favourite websites that I’d have to trawl through the internet to look for. And it just looks pretty. So there.

Alex

Being a mad sports fan, my favourite has to be Eurosport Player. It allows users to watch live sports if you subscribe to their website for just £2.99. (This sounds like a cheesy advert).  Finally I can watch live cycling (Giro d’Italia) on my iPhone. It’s amazeballs!

Clare

Simple. My OK! Magazine app. I’m a sucker for celebrity gossip. I love it more so, due to the fact that I can view it quickly on my phone at my desk – which saves me a trip to the newsagents on a busy day. Some say that’s lazy, I call it efficient.

Dave

My favourite is Vine. It allows users to create and post 6 second video clips. It follows the same principle as Twitter’s 140 characters and is in line with the short bursts of information we’re so used to nowadays via social media. I can also send funny (and slightly weird) videos to my mates, 6 seconds worth of weird.

Andy

I really rate Icon Pop Quiz. It’s a game quiz that challenges players to name famous people, hit movie and TV shows and characters using handcrafted visual clues. It’s very clever how they represent the biggest movies, characters through simple graphic illustration. I mean, white socks with black shoes on tippy toes, who else could it be?! Genius.

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