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Publicity for Nonprofits: Generating Media Exposure That Leads to Awareness, Growth, and Contributions
Every nonprofit organization, regardless of its size, needs publicity to drive awareness of its goals. Yet, breaking through the clutter in today’s information-overloaded society poses a huge challenge to organizations of all sizes.
In Publicity for Nonprofits: Generating Media Exposure That Leads to Awareness, Growth and Contributions, award-winning publicist Sandra Beckwith shows how to capture the public's attention with successful publicity strategies geared specifically for nonprofit organizations. Fascinating nonprofit case studies, detailed instructions, and a rich array of publicity tools and tactics will help your nonprofit organization learn how to:
§ Create an affordable publicity plan that integrates goals, objectives, and key strategies
§ Determine which tools and tactics will have the most impact on your goals
§ Develop and pitch newsworthy stories with powerful messages that will capture media attention and resonate with your audiences
§ Maximize the publicity potential of your organization’s activities, talents and resources
An excellent roadmap that emphasizes how to information, Publicity for Nonprofits is a must have resource for all nonprofit professionals – especially those who know their organization deserves more media attention to achieve its goals.
In Publicity for Nonprofits: Generating Media Exposure That Leads to Awareness, Growth and Contributions, award-winning publicist Sandra Beckwith shows how to capture the public's attention with successful publicity strategies geared specifically for nonprofit organizations. Fascinating nonprofit case studies, detailed instructions, and a rich array of publicity tools and tactics will help your nonprofit organization learn how to:
§ Create an affordable publicity plan that integrates goals, objectives, and key strategies
§ Determine which tools and tactics will have the most impact on your goals
§ Develop and pitch newsworthy stories with powerful messages that will capture media attention and resonate with your audiences
§ Maximize the publicity potential of your organization’s activities, talents and resources
An excellent roadmap that emphasizes how to information, Publicity for Nonprofits is a must have resource for all nonprofit professionals – especially those who know their organization deserves more media attention to achieve its goals.
- GenresBusiness
256 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2006
9 people want to read
About the author
Sandra Beckwith
9 books137 followersI'm an award-winning former publicist who now teaches authors how to promote, publicize, and market their books. Get free book marketing tips twice a month by subscribing to my "Build Book Buzz" newsletter at http://buildbookbuzz.com.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 2, 2021
This book is useful, but more geared to larger nonprofits, the kind with teams of grant writers and development offices. It’s also slightly dated; references to the internet are a bit tentative, as if the author was skeptical about how useful that would be. But it’s well-organized, with some handy templates and samples in the appendix. I’d be wary of trusting any of the links, but this would be a good go-to for getting in touch with TV hosts.
April 29, 2012
A how-to book is never going to please everyone. It might bore people who already know the basics or confound people for whom the basics are completely new territory. But while it's an impossible goal, it's still a good idea to strive to please the entire crowd. In that regard, Beckwith's book drops the ball.
To be fair, her book does provide information that should help any nonprofit. Some of that information is the stuff of common sense. Other information will seem superfluous to more intuitive readers who are naturals at understanding what a journalist or editor wants in a story. But there are plenty of other tips and suggestions that common sense and intuition won't provide.
Where Beckwith drops the ball is in her conception of who needs this book. For established nonprofits with large budgets, there is plenty of relevant information, but nonprofits in start-up or growth stages that have very limited budgets will mostly be left in the cold. Ironically, the former should need less help with publicity in the first place. As mature nonprofits, they should already have media-savvy personnel, and as large-budget nonprofits, they should have the funds for direct-mail campaigns, media consultants, and so forth.
The nonprofits that really need guideance--start-ups and growing organizations that are still precariously juggling their expenses--will have to think through much of Beckwith's advice to distill what's useful and what's not. Some of Beckwith's advice will, at best, make for a long-term goal post for the start-up that is still devoting all of its staff and volunteer resources to working in the trenches and doesn't have the luxury of having designated spokespeople or media relations specialists. Readers from those nonprofits will get to chapters with titles like "Press Release Distribution Services" and "Do You Need to Hire a Publicity Consultant?" and wonder if they should even keep reading. They will be disappointed by the appendix of "Sample Tools" when they see that most of the sample material pertains to a $70 million sculpture museum. (It doesn't get much better; a sample op-ed is from Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, and a sample news release is from an animal charity announcing a $100,000 expansion.)
The author's minimal efforts for the nonprofits that need the most help are baffling and disappointing. Organizations that need advice on grassroots publicity tactics are probably going to be better served by another book.
To be fair, her book does provide information that should help any nonprofit. Some of that information is the stuff of common sense. Other information will seem superfluous to more intuitive readers who are naturals at understanding what a journalist or editor wants in a story. But there are plenty of other tips and suggestions that common sense and intuition won't provide.
Where Beckwith drops the ball is in her conception of who needs this book. For established nonprofits with large budgets, there is plenty of relevant information, but nonprofits in start-up or growth stages that have very limited budgets will mostly be left in the cold. Ironically, the former should need less help with publicity in the first place. As mature nonprofits, they should already have media-savvy personnel, and as large-budget nonprofits, they should have the funds for direct-mail campaigns, media consultants, and so forth.
The nonprofits that really need guideance--start-ups and growing organizations that are still precariously juggling their expenses--will have to think through much of Beckwith's advice to distill what's useful and what's not. Some of Beckwith's advice will, at best, make for a long-term goal post for the start-up that is still devoting all of its staff and volunteer resources to working in the trenches and doesn't have the luxury of having designated spokespeople or media relations specialists. Readers from those nonprofits will get to chapters with titles like "Press Release Distribution Services" and "Do You Need to Hire a Publicity Consultant?" and wonder if they should even keep reading. They will be disappointed by the appendix of "Sample Tools" when they see that most of the sample material pertains to a $70 million sculpture museum. (It doesn't get much better; a sample op-ed is from Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, and a sample news release is from an animal charity announcing a $100,000 expansion.)
The author's minimal efforts for the nonprofits that need the most help are baffling and disappointing. Organizations that need advice on grassroots publicity tactics are probably going to be better served by another book.
May 6, 2007
This is a really good, organized list of all of the basic tools and strategies available to folks doing PR for nonprofits (or politics). Some of it was obvious to me from my practical experience, some of it was new, and some of it was just spelled out in a helpful way I hadn't actually thought about before.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews