This Is Iowa

Today I want to talk about the landscape you might encounter if you decide to help an emerging nonprofit with media (including social media) strategy. Over the past year, I’ve started branching out from my normal pr duties at a nonprofit and have volunteered my time to help new nonprofits draw media attention to their causes.

I haven’t been in this game long, but I’ve already noticed one major trait shared by those brave souls who throw caution to the wind and start a 501(c)(3). It’s happened enough times now that I’m calling it a pattern. And that pattern is this: these folks have created an organization that perfectly fills in the gap where either governments or other nonprofits come up short; they have thought about wonderful ways to market their products, i.e. catchy campaign names and sophisticated websites; they even know exactly what they want their first three press releases to be about. But, sadly, they have not spent one second considering to whom to target all of their marketing.

I’ve been very, very fortunate to work for orgs that are, across the board, staffed by excellent people with unquestionably good intentions. While their enthusiasm is magnetic, however, most emerging nonprofit leaders (in my experience) have not even begun to think about the media or their potential donors. They've spent so much time (rightly) poring over how exactly to get their products to the people most in need that they haven't thought through a comprehensive pr strategy. It’s as though they think that if you tweet it, they will come. Field of Dreams, though, pr is not. This is Iowa, not heaven. And you won’t be playing catch with Moonlight Graham anytime soon.

As the media manager, you have to focus your client. You have to be the good cop and the bad cop, all rolled into one, with special emphasis (especially at the beginning of your working relationship) on the bad cop – otherwise, you’ll get your client’s expectations pumped up all out of control ("Sure, no problem - if you want us on the front page of The New York Times, then your wish is my command!"), and the high bar will be set just a little too high.

I want to reiterate here that I am volunteering for these orgs, and that they have virtually no budgets; if you were working full-time for a well-funded nonprofit with oodles of money to spend, obviously my advice would be different.

To continue with my volunteering framework, it would be great if Time Magazine ran a cover piece on how your nonprofit is going to change the world, but don’t bet that it will; in fact, I can personally guarantee you that Time Magazine doesn’t give two hoots about your organization that has yet to issue its first press release. I’m not being mean: it’s just the brutal truth of journalism that until a buzz is already in full swing, most writers won’t give your org the time of day.

What I’m saying is that you have to bring your client’s expectations back down to earth. That doesn’t mean you should be a negative Nancy, though: assure them that at some point, once you’ve built up a track record for changing people’s lives for the better, Newsweek might be more willing to take a chance on you.

In the meantime, in most instances, you should start assembling more modest, targeted media email distribution lists. Email or fax your press releases to local and regional media: dailies, magazines, radio shows geared toward a field relevant to your nonprofit, local television media. If your releases are more event announcements than traditional press releases, many news services such as the Associated Press and Bloomberg run things called Day Books; see if you can get your event listed there. Search out reporters/producers who have a history of writing about nonprofits and charities. Start following local reporters’ twitter accounts, try to get them to follow you. Friend local media on Facebook. Start leaving comments on blogs written by folks working on similar issues so that maybe they’ll comment on your blog.

These may seem like obvious suggestions, and they are, but the tricky part will be to get your client to tone down their ambitions media-wise (after all, they’re ambitious people; they wouldn’t be starting up a nonprofit with virtually no resources if they weren’t!).

On top of this, your client may, in addition to targeting media, want to get the word out to potential donors that they are now accepting donations. But an exhortation of “Let’s send our press release to all of the members of the Forbes 100 list” on the part of your client should be met by you not with a chuckle, but with a firm, “Let’s try a different approach” because, let’s face it, nobody even knows who you are yet.

Not that the general public won’t know your service eventually, and not that Bill and Melinda won’t shower you with chests full of gold at some point, but for now, again, start small and work your way up the charts. Search Google for similar nonprofits or charities and figure out who their corporate sponsors are. Quiz your client on who they’d like to see donating to them (again, encourage them to think local/regional: everyone would love to have IBM for a sponsor, but let’s be realistic here). Look for grants in the area of your focus.

In other words, do your homework so the client doesn’t have to!

Death Cab for Snooty

Yes, that's a bad play on the name of one of my favorite bands, Death Cab for Cutie. I had a disastrous run-in with a stuck-up, rude cab driver recently, and after the dust had settled, after he'd driven away with his nose in the air, I realized how amazingly bad his display of rudeness had been for the cab company's pr. From the moment I opened the car door to the moment I slammed it in the cabbie's face, it was truly a clinic in atrocious behavior (on the cabbie's part, that is).

Since I try always to see the good side of things ("try" being the operative word), this incident helped me to sharpen my notions of what good and bad pr actually are, and the razor-thin margin that exists between a good experience and a relationship-ending one. Here are a few points I'd like to pass along:

Point #1: The Tone of Your Voice Matters

Though we in pr are all stretched as thin as bigfoot's toothpaste tube, we have to slow down when talking to our clients. We have to treat them as though each were our only customer, and that holds true for everyone from small start-ups to massive corporations. More specifically, what I mean is this: don't be typing an email while talking to client #46 on the phone, don't be cueing up a new radio station on Pandora, don't be pounding out a tweet about a new foursquare feature so you can beat supertweeterx to the punch: none of it.

When the client is on the phone, the spotlight is on them. Try as hard as you can not to be distracted, and certainly don't make them feel like they're eating up precious time that you could be devoting to other clients.

How the cab driver screwed up Point #1:

A little background: I went to the hospital a week ago. Without giving a lot of details, someone related to me had had an accident (nothing serious, thank goodness), and I was picking them up from the ER. So I called a cab. People call cabs so often from this ER that they have a red phone bolted to the wall that, when you pick it up, dials directly to the taxi company (I won't name names because I've had lots of other good experiences with them).

After I gave my name to the taxi co. and arranged for a cab to pick me up, I walked to the waiting room lobby, where I saw a few other people lined up, waiting for a taxi. One of these people, an elderly woman with a walker and accompanied by an assistant, told me she'd been waiting for 45 minutes for a cab! (Ok, this is actually screw up #1 - don't make people at a hospital wait 45 minutes for your bloody cabs). The ER receptionist said that she'd called four times on behalf of the lady, and no cabs had shown up. Suddenly, I saw a cab pull up to the wrong entrance, and two kids hopped in the cab, which quickly sped away. Obviously, the kids had stolen the lady's ride.

Fuming, I walked outside with the old woman (for whom the ER receptionist called another cab) and stood with her, hoping a taxi would come. And then one did. Mine. I walked up to it, verified with the driver that he was there for me. He nodded, and at that moment, I did something that probably a million other cab riders have done over the long, storied history of taxis: I volunteered to give it up so the old lady could have it.

Cue Twilight Zone music.

With a tone not unlike the drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket", with eyes like blow gun darts, the driver yelled at me, saying, "No! I am here for you. I cannot take her. I must take you!"

Monday Morning quarterbacking though this may be, I see at least two huge errors here worth noting: 1.) Never, ever, ever ever ever ever yell at a client. Did I mention "ever"? and 2.) The driver reacted as nimbly to the changing events on the ground as an elephant on Xanax, and I got the feeling - judging by the way he kept looking at his dashboard computer thingy and consulting his watch - that I was jeopardizing other fares by holding Super

Cabbie of the Century there, arguing with him.

The point is this: stay professional and always be in charge: when the client (in this situation, me) sees you freak out, he will ascribe this freaking-out nature to your whole business.

Point #2 - Instant Karma's Gonna Get You

Always act like the pr police are standing right behind you, just waiting for you to screw up. This is especially important for us freelancers who don't have a dreaded boss breathing icy tendrils of paranoia down our neck. Sure, you may have had a long day; sure, the blood vessels in your head may be belching out arias of headache-inducing mania, but you have to be patient with everyone.

How the cab driver punched karma in the face and took its lunch money:

After I repeated my proposition a few more times, each time feeling the steely rebuff of the world's most stubborn cabbie (he never did articulate clearly why he couldn't take the woman home instead of me; he kept blabbering about rules and some arcane liability nonsense), I grew fed-up and finally slammed the door in his face, cutting off his senseless monologue mid-sentence. He peeled out, leaving the elderly woman, her assistant, and me in the dust. "Hahahaha!" I could almost hear him cackling gleefully. "I showed them how in charge I am!"

Ah, poor, misdirected cab driver man. Little did you know that also standing nearby in the parking lot, hanging back in the shadows so she could take in every syllable of our exchange, was a woman (I'm still not totally sure why she was there) whose husband is a dispatcher for the same cab company (I mean: tell me karma doesn't exist). She walked over to me and said that she'd noted the cab's license plate number and had already called her husband to tell her about all she'd seen. Her husband assured her that he would report the cab driver to management.

Will I boycott this particular cab company? Probably not, since they have a monopoly in my area (sigh). But I look at them with less regard than I used to, and that matters. What happens if a competitor pops up? Will I be willing to try them out? You bet I will. And I'll even be willing to give them more than one opportunity to impress me. And, just to be safe, I'll make sure to befriend a relative of one of their dispatchers.

Insight on Inciting Passion

I just got finished reading this post about how pr pros should keep their eyes on the ball when ensuring their clients are "inciting" passion in their audiences. This notion is, on the one hand, obvious: it's good to keep people engaged and excited about a cause so that (let me hit my cynical button for a second) they keep signing their checks to you. Obvious, that is, to you as a pr superstar; not so obvious, however, to clients, especially if they are new to the social media/pr game and think that sending out a random tweet every few hours constitutes staying on the cutting edge.

Case in point: I'm now freelancing as the media guru for a new-ish nonprofit that's been doing good work in South America. Their bona fides are tremendous: they send doctors from a world-renowned medical university to a third-world country to treat and prevent cervical cancer in native women. A major figure within the university is intimately involved, and the care the volunteers give is top-notch. These volunteers are highly-motivated. The organization was recently awarded a grant from a reputable place, and they have a roster of donors. They even have a catchy acronym-y name.

What could be better?

Well, you can have the coolest nonprofit in recorded history, but if nobody knows about it, it's not going to get you where you need to go. Key to getting the word out about the organization is of course your basic array of press releases, newspaper placements, TV/radio interviews, etc. And also, increasingly, blog entries, tweets, Facebook updates, and foursquare check-ins.

But again, as Emily Taylor's article attests, none of this will do any good unless every single message you transmit is custom-designed to incite excitement in your audience. And that comes with knowing your audience well. In turn, especially if you're just starting to work with an organization (as I am), you must insist that your client thinks through both to whom they want to target their pr efforts and - and this is really important - how they want to target them.

I've been doing a fair amount of reflection lately, especially on the latter point. I could be proven wrong since this is my first freelance gig, but I will be asking exactly what sort of tone the organization wants to set, especially in our social media campaign. I see plenty of organizations who send out very formal tweets around the same time every day - "Watch live as we drill a well in Mozambique" - and, I mean, that's fine. But why not personalize it? Add a little humor here and there? "Watch as Joltin' Joe Hamlin journeys to ctr of the earth looking for H2O!" Or something. Anything with a bit of personality, to make folks feel like they're in for a fun, rewarding experience.

Of course, our press releases cannot have this same tone, given that I'm going to be trying to get them picked up by large and small news outlets alike (not to mention corporate donors who probably don't have time for creative tweets). But blog posts can and should have some flava. In line with this, though, you'll need to give your clients a head's up regarding the tone you'll be using across different platforms.

Yeah, sure, the nonprofit is running the show and, let's be honest, a group of medical school doctors probably won't be overly-excited about fun, personal-ish tweets. But you should (and I will be doing this) really try to convince them of the power informal-seeming tweets/facebook updates have to getting folks excited about a cause. You're coming at people not as a monolithic institution through Twitter, but as a person who's enthused about a cause. If you don't have a "tonal plan" going in, your authorial voice will shift from post to tweet to update, and people will start to wonder if you know what you're doing.

Audiences want to be entertained/inspired/stoked, and the best way to do this is not only to write novel messages, but also to project them in a consistently creative way. I'll let you know how this plan goes as I implement it.

Oh yeah, and Happy Labor Day everyone!