A BUMP IN THE ROAD
Raising awareness without a specific call to action.
Public relations is a field that many people don’t understand. They believe that anyone can do what a public relations professional does without any skill or training. Well, clearly they have not taken a campaigns class or attempted to provide a campaign for a non-profit organization. It’s hard to find the right balance between doing what you think is beneficial from a public relations perspective and doing what the client feels to be beneficial from their standpoint. That’s the position our group is currently in with our client, Center For Children and Families, Inc., (CCFI).
We have a wonderful organization for which we are currently developing a public relations campaign to attract more media coverage for their events. CCFI is a non-profit organization that helps many different individuals throughout the Norman, Okla. community. Last year they helped nearly 10,000 clients and are, to date, at capacity for taking on new ones. Receiving more clients might not be possible at this time for CCFI, because they are helping as many individuals as their resources will allow.
CCFI is a branch of the United Way Foundation. They are currently in a “blackout” period due to United Way policy. This means that they are not allowed to ask for dollar donations of any amount until otherwise specified by United Way. (I believe the blackout period will end sometime in November).
This is where our campaigns group hit a small bump. We have been asked to attract positive attention to CCFI from caring individuals in our community. This is doable. However, what will be their call to action? Once these people have heard of and are familiar with our organization, what will they do with their new knowledge? After speaking with Communications Specialist, Whitney Russell, we decided that it would still be beneficial to raise awareness of CCFI throughout Norman in order to build future groundwork in working with our great community. It may not be easy to raise awareness without asking for a specific call to action from our target audience, but whoever said the real world of public relations was easy?
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1 comment:
Non Profit PR can be very difficult because of the numerous challenges like finding a call to action when there seems to be no way to give one. I think a good solution in this case is to tell people not to donate till 2008 and then add to the campaign a sort of "reminder" mini campaign. While this maybe more work it would still get the ultimate job done.
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