The Four Main Reasons Your NFP’s Media Releases Aren’t Getting Picked Up

Journalists are busy people who are looking for any excuse to set fire to your not-for-profits (NFP’s) media release. It’s a sad story but that’s where most of them go. If you continue to send terrible media releases, you’ll soon be put on a journalist’s spam list, which will permanently send your pitches to the media graveyard. So many NFP’s continue to churn out media releases that are destined for the e-trash can, and what they are usually doing wrong is making four grievous errors. Here’s our top tips on how to remedy those mistakes:

Lack of creativity

Most web articles written about an NFP’s media release start by emphasising the importance of getting the headline or lede right as the first step to a strong media release. Wrong. Of course the headline and lede are both critical elements of an impactful media release, but the first and most important step to take before you even write a media release is the creative process.

You want to create a story that engages the reader and intersects with the news cycle, not a media release that is self-referential and simply lists facts about your NFP. Facts aren’t automatically interesting. They don’t arrange themselves, otherwise everyone’s media releases would be exactly the same. We construct our media releases and we need to inject them with creativity.

For example, if we’re writing a media release for a franchise that wants to sell more computers we could talk at length about quadcore or CPUs, or we could call on parents to buy their daughters computers for Xmas to encourage careers in STEM.

Both media releases’ ultimate aim is to sell computers, but one is marketing, the other is a story. The media run stories, not marketing.

Poor headline and lede

Think of a media release like a 30 second elevator pitch and that you’re selling an idea to a producer. You’ve got the ear (or eye) of this busy person, but you have limited time to engage them. That’s why you need a strong headline and lede!

The lede should include the who, what, where, and when of your story, but also what’s interesting or important about it from a news point of view. What is at stake if something does or does not happen? Will the town burn down if emergency services aren’t funded properly? Encapsulate what the story is early, make it urgent, interesting, local, or innovative and unique. Think about whether you’d read it if you were a member of the public.

It’s the idea, stupid. Remove the sludge

This is a stylistic matter but important. Journalism is all about efficiency and clean storytelling. Stacking a release with superlatives is irritating, especially if they aren’t apt, deserved, or are boastful. Remove such words from your release.

It’s the ideas that tell your story, not the adjectives. Make sure the reader can understand the idea without tripping over waffle words or superlatives and get to the heart of the message you want to convey. Sludge words take us away from the idea and are often stuffed into a release when not enough work has been done on the idea .Most of the world’s great writers don’t use long strings of obscure words, they write clean copy. Foreign policy writers, short story writers like John Cheever and Raymond Carver, speechwriters. Go and read them and you’ll see the idea is key to engaging storytelling. A media release should tell a story.

Bespoke pitching, not scattergun

Once you’re ready to pitch, do not, we repeat, DO NOT spray your release across the known media universe. You might think pitching your story to all and sundry is great, but when you’re sending a release about a social issue to a sports journalist, you’re going to quickly end up on their spam list and miss out on engaging them on a story that may actually be of interest to them. Know who you’re pitching to and build a media list that’s appropriate to the story you’re pitching.

Go through the best fit journalists one at a time and offer them the yarn – as an exclusive if need be. Embargoed releases are fine for stories that you are confident will have mass appeal, but if not, shop your story around one journalist and platform at a time