This week let’s talk about the Public Relations (PR) Plan. Now many of us know PR as the way we communicate with external forces to get word out about what our organization does. In reality, it is the underlying piece of marketing and advertising we do and while, yes, we do depend on external forces to help us spread the word, it is just as important to include a PR plan in our communications plan. This plan will help you coordinate your overall plan and help guide you through the process. There will also be a gem of wisdom at the end so be sure to read to the end.
Special shout out here to Jenn and Rachel at Sapphire Strategy for being experts at their jobs and patiently educating me during the project we worked on together. They didn’t pay me to say that but, they have been invaluable assets in my communications and public relations studies.
Recently, the organization I work for did a rebranding and marketing strategy, so I thought, in order to help you understand the process – I’d share that experience with you. To note – we received a grant specifically for this project and we able to hire an outside vendor to assist with designing and planning. This was extremely helpful but if your organization does not have the budget to hire a company to do this, there are many resources online that can help you. I will add a list of links at the end of this post to help save you some time later.
The first step in the process is doing a marketing audit. It is important to get an idea of what your baseline is. This will often include an Industry Analysis, Competitive Analysis, and a SWOT analysis. The Industry Analysis is usually done in a way that includes your staff and considers your reputation. In our case, we also wanted to include ways in which we were collaborating with other agencies and partners as well. The Competitive Analysis, sometimes can look at your competition but isn’t limited to just that. In our case, our competition was people not being able to connect well with the mission. You need people to connect to the mission because that will lead to more clients, more volunteers, and more donations. And lastly, the SWOT Analysis. Knowing your strengths, weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats are key to customizing your PR plan for fairly obvious reasons. You’ll want to play on your strengths, improve your weaknesses, take notice of opportunities, and address potential threats.
Step two is where you start looking at your details. Look at your messaging. What is your mission? What is your Vision? What are your values? What words or phrases stuck out at you when looking at the audit results? Do you have a brand that represents these things well? What is unique about your organization? Consider making a “Message House”. We wanted to be sure we used clear and consistent language across the board. This included:
- Naming Convention (how our name would be used in written communications)
- Mission
- A Standard “Boilerplate” (this is something to use for press releases, a program bio, or when a concise and descriptive explanation of what the organization does)
- A list of Services with short descriptions
- A list of Services with more formal, description, and detailed information
- Unique Selling Proposition (this doesn’t translate well from business to NP but it is generally why someone should come/donate to your organization instead of another one that offers the same service)
- A list of Service Values (sometimes called Value Propositions, these are benefits someone will receive when using your services)
- Your Target Personas (be sure to break these down into different categories if you have them. In our case, we have clients, board members, volunteers, donors, and community members)
Now comes the time for strategy. It’s important that all of your Message House is completed before you start this part. You can’t have a great strategy until you understand your market, verify that your brand is on point, and who the target audience(s) is(are). Strategy is where you start looking at content, channels of communication, and how you intend to support those two things. Below is a breakdown of what could be included in these different categories.
- Content: Website, Blogs, Flyers, Videos, Whitepapers, Social Media, Direct Mail, Email, Events, and specific Appeals or Campaigns, and Press Releases.
- Channels of Communication: Social Media, Email, Website, Traditional Flyers/Outreach, Events, and People (board members or organization ambassadors)
You will be combining the content with the channels and most importantly, and we know this as fundraisers, planning is the key here – have a content calendar! Plan that out. Detail it. Be sure to reference that calendar when you are working on creating your content. And yes, do it one year at a time. I would seriously suggest working one year ahead of time, ideally one month before you create your budget. I am not suggesting you start the full PR plan in one month, that will take a lot more time. I am suggesting you start the content planning a month before budgeting. This will allow you to ensure you have the budget to successfully fund these PR/marketing efforts.
Remember, you can only determine your success by establishing goals. In our case, our PR/marketing goals are to increase visits to our website (Google Analytics is your friend), increase the number of interactions across all social media platforms (Hootsuite helps a lot), and provide more resources to clients. These goals help us reach overall organizational goals that include bring more awareness (more clients, donors, volunteers), energize our board, and solidify our partnerships within the community. With a lot of stress on creating SMART goals, when it comes to overall organization metrics, it will be much harder to measure. Knowing baseline metrics for the social media, PR bites, website, etc. those will be the goals you can measure, in this case – we’d love to double across the board within the first three months.
And now the gem…
You are absolutely capable of doing this. It is overwhelming at first. Once you create your first plan though, it can act as a template. And you aren’t alone. If there is anything I have learned in the non-profit community, its that we are all in this to help each other reach our goals. Reach out. Ask questions. You’ve got this.
Resources:
Fundraising with Jenn 