We’ve got a lovely growing community here at Bright One. In fact, over 100 of them have signed up to our monthly newsletter.

But we’re are that some of you out there will need some more convincing…

Yeah, yeah. We know, we know. “Not another email newsletter,” you say. “My inbox is already full to the brim.”

We hear you. We feel the same about many of the newsletters we receive (apart from Train Spotter’s Weekly – we always read that one from top to bottom).

That’s why we make sure that the Bright One newsletter:

1. only hits your inbox once a month,  a little over 11 times a year and a little under 13 times a year, which isn’t too much
2. actually contains news of interest, such as tips and tricks, volunteering opportunities, client news, and plenty more
3. is short and sweet, so you can digest everything quickly
4. is easy to unsubscribe from, in case for some obscure reason you don’t want to hear from us (the last thing we want to do is spam you)

So what do you say – doesn’t sound too bad, huh?

If you’re convinced, you sign up to our monthly letter by clicking on this link right here and following the instructions.

And if you have any suggestions on how we can improve the newsletter, just let us know and we’ll make the changes lickity spit.

Of course, you’ll need to sign up to the newsletter before you can to do that.

 
So you’ve got the hang of tweeting and branded your twitter profile, but how do you find more people to follow? This post is the third part in our series of ‘Guides to Twitter’, written by Alisha Ramos. You can follow Alisha on Twitter at @alishalisha and Bright One at @brightonecomms.
 
 
Finding relevant people to follow on Twitter can seem like a daunting process. There are millions of people on Twitter, so how do you find the right ones to follow? Below is a list of useful tools to help you find people to follow.

1. The Twitter Search Engine
The Twitter search engine (search.twitter.com) is a powerful tool. Type in any general search term that is related to your company, nonprofit, or interests, and you can see a live feed of everyone who is tweeting on that topic. It may take some patience to weed through all the spammy, irrelevant mentions of the keyword, but you might be able to find some interesting people through the Twitter Search Engine.

2. Other Twitter Accounts
Looking at who other people are following is also an easy step in following relevant people on Twitter. Many Twitter accounts have “lists” that sort accounts in categories, which can be useful for browsing.

It might be best to start off with an influential person or website in your industry. For example, if I were a nonprofit, I would probably look at a Twitter profile like Idealist (@Idealist) and see who they are following and who they are talking about and do the same with those people and so on.

3. Online Twitter Directories
There are many new websites popping up now that serve as directories for Twitter accounts and groups. Here are some you may find useful:

1. WeFollow – WeFollow is probably the best, and is easy to use. Simply sign in with your Twitter account, add yourself to the directory, and see who else has added themselves in that directory. You can also see who the biggest “influencers” are in that category and who has the most followers
2. Twibes – Similarly, Twibes acts as a directory for Twitter accounts
3. Mr. Tweet – A service that recommends users you should follow
4. Twellow – Another comprehensive directory for Twitter accounts

4. “Find People” Function on Twitter
If you click “Find People” at the top of your Twitter page, you can click on “Browse Interests” and select the relevant category to see accounts that are recommended by Twitter.

Twitter now also has a function on some user profiles which presents recommended accounts to follow on the sidebar.

Not long ago Bright One volunteer Keri Hudson signposted us to the Backing Young Britain campaign, and we’re pleased to announce our support for it.

Backing Young Britain is a cross-Government campaign calling on all organisations across the country to create more opportunities for young people. Times are tough for young people who are leaving school or full-time education. Yet they are the future of our workforce and it’s vital that they get the help they need now, to find a job, get training, or build their work skills and experience.

Supporting young people has always been central to our goals here at Bright One. When we set up, one of our aims was to help students of PR and media gain valuable work experience in providing PR support to organisations in the Third Sector, in the hope that this experience would aid them in their search for employment after university. To date we’ve had some fantastic students volunteer with Bright One who have worked alongside experienced PR and communications professionals to provide innovative support to a wide variety of Third Sector organisations and campaigns.

But don’t just take our word for it – PR student Alex Judd, a volunteer at Bright One, tells more about how Bright One has helped him:

“I would thoroughly recommend volunteering for Bright One to any student. The guys you’ll work with are incredibly helpful and will gladly answer any queries you might have. As you’re working for clients in the third sector, you also feel like you’re helping a worthwhile cause. Not to mention the great experience in PR, meaning if you’re looking for a placement year or seeking employment after you graduate there is no doubt that this experience will mean you’re one step ahead of the competition.”

Find out more about our volunteering opportunities here, check out the Bright One entry on the Backing Young Britain website and find out how you can support Backing Young Britain here.

This post was written by Ben Matthews, founder of Bright One, for the CharityComms askCHARITY blog, a blog with posts about charity communications from a host of experts. You can read the original post here.

Last week, Rupert Murdoch’s The Times followed in the path of the New York Times and announced that they were going to be launching a paywall for the online version of the paper, Times Online. Like other publications, such as the Financial Times, The Times have proposed a £1 per day charge, with £2 getting you a week’s access.

This move is being hotly debated in the media, and it is what many have described as an inevitable move in the face of falling advertising revenues and newspaper circulation. Other newspapers suffering from an equally dismal future are expected to make similar announcements, in an attempt to curtail the drop in revenue that has been a steady feature in recent years.

As communicators, we will need to pay for these subscriptions whether we like it or not. It is our job to keep up with the news and the publications that report it, with many agencies still sifting through the papers every day and reporting back the main stories of relevance, both internally to colleagues and externally to clients. Services such as Google Alerts and RSS Feeds have enabled us to keep up with the latest announcements in close to real time, but those services will soon be limited as articles of interest begin to be placed behind paywalls.

This move is likely to hit charities and social enterprises, who have barely enough resources to pay for proper comms support, harder than commercial companies. Of course, newspapers have to make money, but social enterprises and charities are not really equipped to absorb these new costs – and there is no word of any support if other publications follow suit and move behind paywalls.

The Newspaper Licensing Agency announced a similar move towards the end of last year, requiring organisations copying and distributing online content from publications to pay for the privilege. At least the NLA accommodates charities to an extent, as the licence is tailored to suit the specific copying needs of individual charities from “scanning, emailing of scanned content, receipt of hyperlinks from a licensed press cuttings or PR agency, and/or the sharing of links via a secure company intranet.”

It would be interesting to see if publications who put up paywalls offer similar discounted services to charities, and indeed even the NLA is far from perfect: licensed copies of digital content can only be accessed and stored for up to 28 days following publication, after which they must be deleted.

Will this mean people simply gravitate towards the free content of the Guardian’s popular site? Should we all write a letter to Murdoch asking for charities to be exempted? Or can we support each other by flagging up Times stories to our mates in other charities?

Although the full extent of the media’s move behind paywalls is yet to play out, it’s something that all charities and the communicators working in them should be aware of; and they should be planning to put aside extra resources to pay the price for paywalls (as difficult as it may be in current times).

What are your thoughts on paywalls, and how will it affect your charity’s communications activity?

Social Impact Camp is back! We are happy to announce the details of the next Social Impact Camp. A big thank you goes to the London Early Years Foundation for hosting the event..

• Date: Wednesday 14th April 2010
• Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm
• Location:  London Early Years Foundation, 121 Marsham Street, Lonon SW1P 4LP (Google Map)

You can reserve your place by signing up on the Social Impact Camp wiki.

Social Impact Camp is a monthly meet up for people to discuss different ways of measuring social impact. We compare tactics, think of ways to improve it and wonder if there will ever be a standard set of metrics against which to judge success by. It’s a friendly place, we don’t try and sell to each other; instead we’re honest, pretty and will never wear name tags.

To get a feel for what has happened at past events, take a look at the fantastic blog posts by Rob Greenland of The Social Business and Max St John of Nixon McInnes.

We look forward to seeing you all there for some great conversations…and lots of tea and biscuits.

After a great first two Social Impact Camps in partnership with UnLtdWorld and Leap Anywhere, Bright One are happy to announce the details of the third Social Impact Camp. A big thank you goes to Hotwire for hosting the event..

• Date: Tuesday 16th March 2010
• Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm
• Location: Hotwire, 33-41 Dallington Street, London EC1V oBB (Google Map)

You can reserve your place by signing up on the Social Impact Camp wiki.

Social Impact Camp is a monthly meet up for people to discuss different ways of measuring social impact. We compare tactics, think of ways to improve it and wonder if there will ever be a standard set of metrics against which to judge success by. It’s a friendly place, we don’t try and sell to each other; instead we’re honest, pretty and will never wear name tags.

To get a feel for what has happened at past events, take a look at the fantastic blog posts by Rob Greenland of The Social Business and Max St John of Nixon McInnes.

We look forward to seeing you all there for some great conversations…and lots of tea and biscuits.

This is a guest post from Gerry Kiernan, a Bright One volunteer with eight years experience working at the BBC – namely the Radio Times. She has also worked as Deputy Editor of the BBC’s Ariel online and as a content producer on the BBC’s intranet. She now freelances and blogs about arts and culture at www.poptartlondon.com

“Having just started volunteering at Bright One on the Social Enterprise Mark campaign, I’d like to share some thoughts on my experience of PR in the hope that it will provide some useful tips for publicists to communicate better with journalists. I think there’s a lot we can learn from looking at things from each other’s perspectives.

As a journalist on a national magazine, publicists were always trying to get hold of me. But I was most likely to respond to approaches from those who…

• Called or emailed to tell me (succinctly!) the outline of a story, why our readers would be interested, as well as the section of the magazine they thought it might suit.

• If they also mentioned one or more unusual angles to the story then they’d be ahead of the game

The main mistakes PRs made when approaching me were:

• Not knowing anything about the magazine or the readership. Just because a client thinks it would be great to get a story in x magazine/newspaper/website, it doesn’t mean a journalist will think it’s something their readers would enjoy.
• If a journalist says the story isn’t suitable believe them, and move on. There’s nothing worse than being hassled daily by someone flogging a story that would not suit the publication.
• Mass-mailing a press release that leaves questions unanswered. Be prepared to answer the six questions any good journo would ask – who, what, when, where, why, how? If a PR doesn’t have these basic facts at their fingertips, then I’m less likely to trust them and their story.

That said, if you do have a great story but just can’t seem to get journalists interested, don’t give up straight away..

• Try to tailor the story to your target publication by pulling out an aspect that would interest their readers. Bear in mind that sometimes an ace story might still not suit every publication. For instance NME readers wouldn’t give a damn about Bill Gates learning the guitar for a solo gig even though your client might think otherwise. However, if a journalist says the story is great but there isn’t enough room in the magazine or newspaper, it’s definitely worth keeping in contact.
• When stories drop out at the last minute, journalists are often casting around in desperation for a replacement to fill the page. And you just might happen to email or call at the right moment to save the day.

Finally I’d advise PRs to be creative. I think social media is definitely changing the relationship between journalists and PRs. Publicists have less control, certainly in the celebrity world, over what their clients post on Twitter and Facebook, unless their accounts are being closely managed or ghost-written. Journalists scan social media for stories or case studies, thereby cutting out publicists. Conversely, having been involved in a PR campaign using social media at Bright One, I’ve now seen how valuable social media can be for getting messages out in different ways from blogs to Facebook. I’d like to think that social media is an added extra for both PRs and journalists to make use of. And if the two camps befriend each other through it and swap information, so much the better.”

It’s fair to say that here at Bright One we’re fans of social media. It’s potential to aid third sector organisations to reach and communicate with the individuals who support them, as well as reach new people is vast. We use it a lot when it comes to working with our clients, but it is also a vital tool in our internal and external communications. We see it as a great way to bring together a team of volunteers working remotely, helping them to connect in much more dynamic ways which suit their lifestyles.

We thought that it’d be good to let you all know how we here at Bright One use the internet to reach out to people, so we’ve made the below Bright One Online guide(using the excellent online tool Prezi). It shows you where you can find and connect with all of Bright One on the internet, and keep up-to-date with what we are up to. To watch the guide you can either navigate through it manually (by clicking on the arrow which takes you through each point) or hover over it until you see “autoplay” and it will take you through it..

You can find the links to all our online presence below…don’t be shy, come and find us!

]]> http://brightone.org.uk/bright-one-online/feed/ 1 http://brightone.org.uk/creating-a-pr-strategy/ http://brightone.org.uk/creating-a-pr-strategy/#comments Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:40:46 +0000 benmatthews http://brightone.org.uk/?p=1536

Here at Bright One, we’re regularly approached by charities and not-for-profit organisations who are looking for tips and advice on how to put together a PR strategy.

They’re often aware of what PR is, how it works and the impact it can have on an organisation, but actually taking the first steps in creating a strategy to make this happen is a mystery to them. So just how do you go about creating a PR strategy for your organisation?

Well, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to help you do just that. And as an added bonus, we also got a few top tips sent in by Twitter!

Step 1: Draft your key messages
What is your organisation’s mission? What cause are you supporting? What is different about the way your organisation addresses those challenges? How will you change the world? Asking yourself these key questions and others will help you determine what messages you want to communicate to your audiences and help you to focus your PR strategy.

Step 2: Determine your audience
How do you want to reach? Who will want to hear about the news you have? Who do you want to influence? For charities, this might be donors, government organisations, the general public, NGOs, volunteers, or other sources of support and funding. This may be a long list, but try and narrow it down to the key groups that you want to hear about your organisation’s activities.

Step 3: Find the best channels to your audience
This tip was sent in by Stephen Waddington, Managing Director of Speed Communications. Make a list of all the publications in your target market area. These will most likely be national newspapers, local newspapers, freesheets (such as the Metro) and radio and TV stations. You might also want to create a list of news sites and blogs, or even bypass the media altogether and communicate directly with your target audience through social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. Different channels will be more suitable for your organisation than others, so take time researching which are the most appropriate for you.

Step 4: Brainstorm PR topics
Are you releasing a new product, making an announcement, communicating a change in employees or services, stating an opinion or launching a piece of research? Is your information newsworthy (timely, relevant, interesting)? If you can come up with 12 PR topics, that means you can send out one news announcement every month for a year, which is a very healthy news flow. Plot these into a timeline to see how your PR activity over the year plans out.

Step 5: Find your influencers
This tip was sent in by Heidi Siefkas, a strategic PR professional based in Florida. Influencers are people who have a large following, either through traditional means such as holding a position of influence or in the online world if they have a large number of followers and fans. Influencers are important because if you manage to get them to spread the word about your organisation’s activities for you then you’ll be able to reach a larger audience who trust what those influencers say.

Step 6: Analyse your competitor’s success
This tip was sent in by David Child, a PR at Lucre. What are your competitors doing to promote their own organisation and activities? Where are their messages appearing? Who is giving them attention and support? By watching what others around you are doing and emulating their approach, you’ll be more likely to achieve a similar success.

So that’s a few steps to creating a PR strategy, which should give a great start to any organisation looking to create their own plan. As you can see, most of them are around undertaking solid research. As Mark Pinsent,  a communications consultant based in France, says: “good strategies become obvious with the audience and market insights that research brings. Otherwise, you’re  guessing.”

What tips or advice would you add to those above? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll add them in!

Exciting times here at Bright One at the moment, with our Christmas Drinks (hosted jointly with Third Sector PR) next week (sign up here) and today we’re delighted to announce the launch of some new meetups that we’re setting up: Social Impact Camp.

Not sure about what Social Impact is? Well Wikipedia describes it as: “In business and government policy, social impact refers to how the organisation’s actions affect the surrounding community.”

Over recent weeks there has been a lot of discussion both on and offline about measuring social impact – check out Rob Greenland’s blog to see just one example of some of the debate that’s happening, and seeing some of the good work that MeasurementCamp does, we were inspired to set up Social Impact Camp.

Social Impact Camp is a monthly meet up for people to discuss different ways of measuring social impact. We compare tactics, think of ways to improve it and wonder if there will ever be a standard set of metrics against which to judge success by.

We drink tea, sometimes we eat biscuits too. It’s a friendly place, we don’t try and sell to each other; instead we’re honest, pretty and will never wear name tags.

We’ve set up a Social Impact Camp Wiki-Page here and you can sign up to attend the first Social Impact Camp at the events page here

The first Social Impact Camp is being run in partnership with UnLtdWorld – the social networking site that connects social entrepreneurs to the people, tools and information they need to change the world. Here are the details:

Date: Wednesday 20th January 2010

Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Location: UnLtd, 123 Whitecross Street, EC1Y 8JJ

We look forward to seeing you all there for some great conversations…and lots of biscuits.