This is a guest post from Marc Lawn, Chairman of Camp Quality UK & The Business GP. If you would like to write for the Bright One blog, simply email blog@brightone.org.uk.

Running a charity, using the funds efficiently & effectively is clearly the aim of any business in the 3rd sector. Yes I did say business! Okay so it is contentious in the eyes of some to call it a business but the reality it is.  Third sector organisations are businesses where the profits are reinvested for the benefit of certain causes or groups. It forms part of a different blog topic really but the quicker we all embrace that the better it will be for our service users.

Running a business brings with it some key challenges. One of those is about marketing it effectively for the benefit of all concerned. The objective of marketing in the purest sense is about making the ‘product’ front of mind for people.

Many see PR as cheap advertising. This is a fatal mistake. Clearly an element of it is about having a clear set of messages that you would like to get across to the readers, viewers or listeners BUT the most critical thing that makes a successful PR campaign is preparation, and that preparation focuses on three key components:

1. The message(s) you wish to communicate
2. The flexibility and confidence to have an opinion on matters affecting your specific ‘subject area’
3. A clear brief, and an open partnership with your PR company

When choosing any media, a marketing professional will say three words to you – Message, Audience, Media. The same level of clarity applies to your PR campaign. Understanding who you are trying to target with what message will ensure that you choose the right ‘avenues’ to send the message out. Ironically, the press warm more to organisations who are prepared to have a strong opinion and conviction in that cause so make sure you are comfortable with that.

The final critical element in any campaign is the choice of agency to work with. Most importantly is the fact that you must realise and prepared to be led by them and you must feel 100% trust for their judgement. With a very clear brief and a clear sense of trust you will seize the opportunities that come your way. You have to remember that this is a dynamic and potentially lightning fast market. A nominated contact who is prepared to be available whenever & critically backed up with media training is an invaluable asset for the business, and they will perform their internal duties with renewed confidence.

PR is a great source of awareness building, just understand you cannot control it, but with the right preparation and the right partner you certainly can ride the crest of a wave in perfect harmony.

 
We count ourselves lucky here at Bright One that we get so many fantastic opportunities to help support charity’s communications come our way, as well as the interest from volunteers to match.

But we realise that we don’t always promote these opportunities as best we could, especially as there’s lots of them to let our volunteer base know about.

The ‘Opportunities of the Week’ is an attempt to let volunteers know about roles that they might be interested in getting involved with, in an easily digestible format.

Below is the first in the series, with some fantastic roles on offer. We’ll try to do weekly updates where we can, so if any of these roles are of interest, simply apply to volunteer and we’ll get you going on a project asap!

PR Intern, Bold Creative

Bold Creative is a social and youth innovation agency based in Shoreditch. Employing a unique user-centred approach, theydevelop innovative communication solutions that engage hard to reach groups and empower young people on the issues that matter to them. Pushing through several ground-breaking projects to raise the profile of young People’s voices in mainstream media, Bold Creative have in the last two years won seven international awards including a Royal Television Society award and two BAFTAs. This role involves general marketing tasks such as brand management, maintaining Bold’s social media presence, and growing and monitoring reach and traffic on Bold’s digital media outlets.

PR Executives (all levels), iDance

Combining the power of dance and music with the energy of performance to instil self-confidence in young people.  They are encouraged to make a positive contribution to society, adopt healthy lifestyles and engage in constructive teamwork, regardless of age, ethnicity, race or gender. This role involves event management and promotion experience, as well as social media skills and creating sponsorship opportunities.

PR Executives (all levels), Pants to Poverty

A new type of underwear brand. Not simply content to make some of the most comfortable and stylish pants on the planet, P2P work with thousands of farmers and factory workers in India to celebrate fashion as a beautiful tool to change the world! This role involves social media, event promotion and fashion and consumer media relations.

Media and Web Intern, World Development Movement

WDM is an activist organisation campaigning across the UK for global justice. The media and web intern is an important part of WDM’s communications team which consists of a media officer and a web officer. If you have some experience of HTML, CSS and content management systems, along with desktop publishing software such as Photoshop and an interest in media work, buzz monitoring and social media, they’d like to hear from you. For more information, and details of how to apply, visit the World Development Movement site.

This week, a group of Bright One volunteers were given an exclusive training session by Andrew Bloch, Founder and Managing Director of Frank PR, on “Talkability and the power of word of mouth.”

Talkability was described by Bloch as “the buzz that takes over and does the best marketing for a brand, product or service.”  Talkability is a registered trade mark of Frank PR and has its own proprietary methodology for helping generate ideas that will kick-start word of mouth, to often magnificent results as shown by well known campaigns for CompareTheMarket.com and Kit Kat.

The case studies that the volunteers were shown demonstrated how they can take this way of thinking into the charity work that they’re doing with Bright One, using Talkability to achieve cut through for clients and help them to make the most of limited resources through kick-starting word-of-mouth.

It really was a fantastic session, so a big thank you to Andrew and all at Frank PR for hosting Bright One’s volunteers!

We’re planning to do these training sessions on a regular basis, so please get in touch if you’d like to run a training session on an element of PR for Bright One.

This is a guest post from Zoe Amar, a Bright One volunteer and Lasa’s Marketing and Business Development Manager. This article originally appeared on the CharityComms blog.

Lasa has just celebrated its 25th anniversary with a campaign that generated a return of investment (ROI) of 94:1; this means that for every £1 we spent on the campaign we earned £94. I’m going to talk about how we did it and the lessons I learnt along the way.

You can also use many of these tips to help create a successful relaunch or repositioning.

1. Be clear about why your organisation needs this campaign

Make sure that your reasons to celebrate your anniversary pass the ‘so what?’ test. Unless you are celebrating at least a centenary or more, there’s a risk that you could launch an expensive campaign for its own sake. You need to ask yourself: what’s in it for your audience?

For example, the ultimate aim of Lasa’s 25th anniversary campaign was to tell our stakeholders how our services could help them. To get to the stage where they were receptive to this message, we needed to use the initial phases of the 25th anniversary to:

• rebuild our reputation after a recent restructure
• demonstrate the business case for our services (in our case, increased need for advice about welfare benefits)
• reach influential stakeholders in our market (e.g. Chief Executives and Directors in the charity and public sector organisations who use our services)
• reposition ourselves as a leader in the fields we work in

2. Get buy-in

So, you’ve had a great idea for your anniversary/ relaunch/ repositioning. Now what? You’ll need to get buy-in and support from your board and directors. Make sure that you involve them early on in the planning stages. I found that even when budgets were tight, the board and directors were still supportive if I could show the business case for what I was trying to do.

3. Plan, plan, plan

Who are your target audiences? We invested time in thinking about who we were trying to reach with our 25th anniversary campaign: what kind of people were we targeting? You need to consider what their job titles are, what kinds of organisations they work in and what processes they go through when deciding whether or not to use your services. You also need to think about creating simple but effective key messages that will cut through the ‘clutter’ to reach your audience. What do you want them to do after they’ve experienced your campaign?

In my view, charities should be careful about how they use nostalgia in anniversary campaigns. Sure, what your charity has achieved is important and it’s made a big difference. Celebrating that will reward the loyalty of long term supporters. But keep the focus on what you’d like your audience to do now- e.g. donate or, in our case, fund or use our services. And build into the planning stage how you are going to track the success of your campaign. For example, you can suggest that a donations target should be hit.

4. Choose the best tools for the job

Once you’ve got a business case, buy-in and a broad plan for your campaign, you need to think about how you can find the best tools to reach your target audience. In Lasa’s case, we needed a low cost tool that our stakeholders trusted. We focused on PR, using a mix of press work, sponsorship and two carefully targeted events with speakers that we knew would attract our target audience. We planned the events so that they were as interactive as possible; for example, we launched a survey on the theme of the events a few weeks beforehand, and announced the results a few days before the final ‘flagship’ event.

5. Build the right team for the campaign

Whether you are using staff from your own marketing and communications teams, external suppliers or pro bono help, take the time to choose people who know the tools you want to use, and who can use them well. I was fortunate enough to work with Luica Mak of Bright One and Jo O’ Rourke of Keynote Consulting, both of whom have many years of experience in PR and events.

6. Keep a close eye on costs

With a big campaign, like an anniversary or a relaunch, costs – especially design – can spiral beyond your original estimates. It’s also easy to overlook VAT or other ‘hidden’ costs.

The main lesson I learnt from our 25th anniversary campaign was not to spend a penny of our budget without thinking about what the return on investment would be. As a result, our final campaign costs were less than 40% of our original estimate.

We also were fortunate to have some very good sponsorship opportunities, including from one of our funders, City Bridge Trust.

7. Measure your results

Looking at your original key performance indicators of success for your campaign, how did it perform? At Lasa we achieved some significant press coverage and, as direct result of some networking opportunities from our 25th anniversary event, also won a new contract with a government department.

Keeping these tips in mind, you should be able to generate successful return on investment from your anniversary campaign.

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.”

Bright One’s clients perform feats of amazing power every day and we’re behind them all the way. To help our teams of volunteers we’re looking for a Volunteer Manager, a special kind of person who will go the extra mile for our volunteers.

We’re putting the call out for a Superhero.

The Organisation

For those of you that weren’t aware, Bright One is a completely volunteer-run organisation. We have no paid staff and everyone who volunteers for Bright One does it in their spare time, often fitting it around full time job or their studies. Just like Superman and Spiderman.

Every day that Bright One progresses, we see the fantastic work that our volunteers do for their clients and for Bright One itself. In it’s first year of operation, Bright One’s volunteers donated over 1,500 hours of their time to help charitable organisations such as Refugee Week, The Pixel Project and Child’s i Foundation. This resulted in our clients being able to access the equivalent of over £180,000 of professional communications support and advice. A truly heroic effort.

You can read more about what we have achieved in our Annual Report.

The Challenge

This year, we want to help support more organisations with their communications needs. For that we’ll need more volunteers to work in teams and help these clients achieve their goals. But we also need to look after our current volunteers, as we want to make sure our current clients continue to get a fantastic level of service. And for that to happen we’ll need a Volunteer Manager to look after all of these superheroes.

The Opportunity

The Volunteer Manager is and always will be one of the most important roles for Bright One. Our volunteers are our greatest asset and we work hard to make sure they have the best volunteering expereince with us – from the moment they send us a message to enquire about a volunteer position until the moment they move on from Bright One for whatever reason.

Managing volunteers can be a challenging but rewarding experience. You’ll need to be friendly, sociable, highly organised, self-motivating and a pleasure to work with.

You don’t need to be able to fly, see through brick walls or read minds (though that may help). But you do need to be passionate about about the work of Bright One’s volunteers. You should be excited about the opportunities we are offering to volunteers and about the difference they will make. If you can get passionate about the volunteering opportunities Bright One offers, the possibilities of the difference we can make will increase immeasurably, to superhuman proportions.

The Special Power

What is even more special about this role is that you’ll be a ‘volunteer’ Volunteer Manager, which means that you’ll need to not be afraid of the challenge that this gives rise to, just as we’re not afraid to wait until we have found the perfect person for the job before filling the position.

Volunteers managing volunteers is a difficult relationship to balance and we’re working on making these relationships as smooth as possible through our daily work with Bright One’s various teams. You’ll need to use your Special Powers to work closely with the Bright One management team and come up with ways to make our volunteers work together effectively.

However, we are looking into funding options, so this may well turn into a paid position in the near future – but unfortunately in the current funding climate we can’t guarantee this.

The Role

A typical week will involve ‘meeting and greeting’ between 3 and 5 volunteers, finding out more about them and what causes they’re interested in, capturing their details on a volunteer database, and liaising with the Bright One management team to place the volunteers on to suitable accounts.

The role is expected to take around 4 hours each week and preferable you’ll be based in or around London as this is where the majority of our clients and volunteers are based.

You can view the formal role description here.

The Process

If this description is more exciting than scary, more inspiring than off-putting and you want to apply for the position, please send us your covering email with your CV attached to ben@brightone.org.uk.

We’d also like you to answer the following question to give us an idea about how you might fit into the role:

“What are the three super powers you have that will make you a Volunteer Manager of Superhero proportions?”

We’ll be waiting by the Bat Phone for your call.

Last month, Bright One held the first ever Social Impact Camp in partnership with UnLtdWorld.

The date and venue has now been confirmed for the second event, which is being run in partnership with Leap Anywhere – the definitive guide to every fun event happening in London that benefits a good cause.

Here are the details:

• Date: Wednesday 17th February 2010
• Time: 6:00 – 8:00 pm
• Location: Leap Anywhere HQ, 23-24 Greek Street, London W1D 4DZ (Google Map)

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

In case you’re not sure what the idea behind the event is, 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.

To get a feel for what happened at the first event, 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 biscuits.

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!

This post is part of SHOUT OUT for Social Enteprise, a month long campaign where UnLtdWorld invited social enterprise leaders to write a blog post, which looks at social enterprise from an array of different angles and perspectives. You can read the original post here or discover the rest of the SHOUT OUT posts here.

PR – or public relations – is all about reputation. It’s the result of what you do, what you say, and what others say about you. It is used to gain trust and understanding between an organisation and its various stakeholders, whether that’s employees, customers, investors, or the local community.

PR isn’t just for big companies using national newspapers or television. Even the smallest start up or social enterprise can use PR opportunities to catch the eye of its local audience. But PR is often misunderstood, its practises are often unclear and how to ‘do’ PR is a mystery to many people.

I’ve pulled together some top tips to help make the practise of PR a bit clearer, help you generate some positive PR with limited resources, and offer some simple advice to get your organisation’s own PR and communications activity up and running.

What is Public Relations?
As I mentioned before, PR is all about reputation. Public relations professionals use many different techniques as part of their PR campaigns: from media relations and lobbying, to speaking at conferences, and more. PR is different from marketing and advertising, because with PR you do pay the newspapers and TV channels for the media exposure it secures. It’s the credibility of third-party endorsement that gives PR its power. For more information on the background of PR and its best practices, take a look at the free guides that the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA) has put together.

The Media is a Channel
Many people misunderstand that PR is all about engaging the media and using the coverage generated to put a spotlight on your organisation. But should be made clear is that the media is just a channel, a way to reach your stakeholders. This means that your organisation needs to have its messaging right, its proposition and the impact it makes clear, before you undertake any PR activity. The basics of getting a PR campaign together are covered by Striding Out’s useful guides here.

The Rise of Social Media
Understanding that the media is just a channel to reach your stakeholders is especially important to understand with the rise of social media. Social media cuts out journalist and media organisations as a channel to reach your stakeholders.  Organisations can now interact and engage directly with their stakeholders, using sites such as Facebook and Twitter, in an affordable but effective manner. A blog is also an effective way of getting your organisation’s messages, news and recent announcements out to a wide audience. There’s too much to cover off on social media here, but here’s a fantastic video from Common Craft that explains what social media is in plain English:

There’s too much about using social media to cover it here, but if you’re interested in creating a social media campaign but don’t know where to start, take a look at Content & Motion’s excellent guide here or PR 2.0’s free ebook here.

Get Your Descriptor Right
To help with your messaging, it is worthwhile creating a descriptor for your organisation. A descriptor is a short sentence, no more than a few words long, that captures what your organisation is and does. This acts as an introduction for any press releases you send out and is often used by the media to help categorise your organisation and provide a neat intro into any stories they might write about you. For example:

“Bright One, the volunteer-run communications agency, announced today that it had written a fantastic descriptor for its latest PR campaign.”

Other examples of social enterprises with good descriptors include Divine Chocolate (“The Fairtrade chocolate where the cocoa farmers own 45% of the company”) and MyBnk (“The education charity working with young people to build the knowledge, skills and confidence to manage their money effectively”). UnLtdWorld.com’s is very neat too – “a networking site for social entrepreneurs”.

If it helps you to keep your descriptor clear and succinct, try and keep it to a 140 character, twitter-style description. You could even post your descriptor in the comments below this post and we can help refine it for you.

Register on askCHARITY
askCHARITY was set up to help organisations in their work with the media. It is an online contacts book which lists organisation’s details including their key media contacts. It aims to make it easier and faster for media professionals to get in touch with charitable organisations. askCHARITY also aims to open up, hard to reach sections of the media, so by registering your organisation (which is absolutely free) you’ll stand a much better chance of journalists, broadcasters, researchers, freelancers, and every kind of media professional finding out and taking an interest in your organisation. Find out

Get Professional Help
There are lots of PR professionals out there who are looking to give back to the community and help organisations such as yours tell their story effectively. If you’re interested in bringing on some PR support, I would recommend taking a look at the Media Trust’s Media Matching service, which brings together media and communications professionals (advisers) with charities and voluntary organisations that want to improve the way they communicate. Also take a look at Bright One, the volunteer-run communications agency, who are on hand to offer charities, social enterprises and other not-for-profit organisations affordable yet effective PR and communications campaigns. Bright One helps organisations get their messages heard and offer resources so they can focus on core activities, so find out more by going to www.brightone.org.uk.

Further Reading
The PR industry has developed a fantastic culture of knowledge sharing, which means that there is plenty of information available for you to learn more about running your own campaign. As a starter, I would recommend visiting Volunteer Genie for advice on using the media to recruit the volunteers you want, reading the guide that Business Link have put together, or visiting the askCHARITY blog for lots of advice on communications.

This is a guest post from Ben Cotton, a researcher at the Centre for Public Relations Studies. You can follow Ben on Twitter at @bencotton or read his blog at www.socialwebthing.com.

I was thinking the other day what would have made my life easier in my final year at university. Looking back it was a hectic period – amongst all the deadlines, presentations, portfolios and exams we were looking for that dream graduate job. At times it was difficult balancing the two: trying to clear the immediate university workload, whilst attempting to plan for the future, namely searching and applying for jobs (all over the country) in the industry. It was an uncertain time.

So to make things a bit easier for PR students, I have put together a list of 2010 PR Graduate Schemes, when they open, close and links to apply. I’ll be updating it over the coming months. I hope you find it useful.

Note to companies: if you have a scheme please email us and we’ll add you to the list.

Band & Brown (via Facebook)

• Open: Now
• Closes: 15 November 2009

Blue Rubicon

• Open: Now
• Closes: 31 January 2010

Chime Comms

• Open: Now
• Closes: 15 January 2010

Diffusion PR

• Open: Now
• Closes: 31 Januray 2010

Edelman

• Open: Late November 2009
• Closes: TBA

Fishburn Hedges

• Open: Now
• Closes: 11 January 2010 and 8 February 2010 depending on when you want to start.

Fleishman-Hillard

• Open: Now
• Closes: FH continually run a scheme which lasts 6 months and candidates may be offered a job at the end.

Four Comms

• Open: December 2009
• Closes: TBA

Hill & Knowlton

• Open: April 2010
• Closes: TBA

Hotwire

• Open: December 2009
• Closes: TBA

Shine Comms

• Open: January 2010
• Closes: TBA

Weber Shandwick

• Open: TBA
• Closes: TBA