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 week saw Bright One hold our first ever Summer Party!

It was a fantastic event with a great turnout, with just the right mix of volunteers, clients, friends and people interested in getting involved. While some masterfully avoided the karaoke, some spent most of their time hogging the mike. Either way, there were plenty of good times had and good drinks drunk.

If you couldn’t make it this time around, you won’t be missing out for long as we’ll be holding more events soon and you can get in touch if you had anything you wanted to find out about.

Thanks to all those who came along and see you at the next one!

This post is written as part of Volunteers’ Week, a national celebration of volunteers and volunteering which takes place from 1 – 7 June of each year. This year, Volunteers’ Week is celebrating its 25th anniversary.If you would like the opportunity to find out more about volutneering opportunities with Bright One, you can contact us on info@brightone.org.uk.

Bright One is run completely by volunteers and would not exist as an organisation without these people giving up their spare time to provide valuable communications support to third sector organisations.

We want to acknowledge all of Bright One’s volunteers for their contribution to our organisation. They are all making a valuable difference, not just to Bright One, but to the many organisations we are helping. The feedback we get from the organisations we work with has been overwhelmingly positive towards Bright One’s volunteers, which shows the commitment, professionialism and passion that they bring to their work.

Bright One’s volunteers give their time for free, and the least we can do is to recognise this fantastic commitment by showing our appreciation for them. As such, we’ve left a ‘Thank You’ message on the Volunteers’ Week website. You can read our message and the many others from organisations all around the UK who have nefited from the generous help of volunteers by visitng the Volunteers’ Week site here.

To all of our volunteers, we are really grateful for all you do and the difference you make!

This is a guest post from Becky McMichael, a PR at Ruder Finn, lover of gin and tonic, firm believer you can have a career, a family and live outside of London. You can read more from Becky on her personal blog or on the Ruder Finn blog.

No matter how much work you do behind the scenes, as a junior PR consultant, a client will never know who you are or why they are paying for your time unless you take an active role in meetings. Getting started with this can be tough for many people, especially when there is a large team of more senior folks in the room.

Here are my tips:

1. Agree a role with your manager before you go in
2. Own a bit of the agenda to run through / update on
3. Keep something special to tell the client – a hit you got, an opportunity you secured or a new industry thing they might be interested in
4. Ask questions….think of something before you go in
5. Check their news daily – you won’t learn and feel confident offering an opinion if you don’t read
6. Look at the headlines before every meeting – any customer or competitor been written about that day?
7. Check the stock price, it’ll help you know what their focus is before the meeting
8. Introduce yourself and explain your role on the account
9. Listen in to as many calls as you can – good way of learning before you speak
10. Listen in to media briefings – helps you know the ropes before you host them yourself
11. Remember the client is paying for your time, always think about demonstrating value to them by making a contribution

Anything I missed?

Want to write a guest post for Bright One? Send your ideas to info@brightone.org.uk!