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How to devise a media strategy

The word “strategy” tends to send people into a panic and a flurry of fraught meetings. It doesn’t have to be a painful, drawn out process. A media strategy is simply a plan. A concise plan: a tool to help you focus your volunteer recruitment work.

The most important thing is to ask WHY?

  • Why does your organisation want to recruit volunteers?
  • Why do you want to use the media to recruit these volunteers?

If you can answer these questions in a concise, clear statement, avoiding any ‘generalisms’, then you’ve got the backbone to your media strategy.

We’ve devised a short, simple Volunteer Genie Questionnaire to help you build your own media strategy. Work through the questions, keeping your answers as simple and clear as you can – no jargon!

Set your goals

If you can’t easily explain the aim of your media work then no journalist or potential volunteer will be able to understand it either. Clarity is everything. Make sure to set achievable aims in your media plan.

  • Some organisations set a target number of volunteers they want to recruit. This can be useful to help plan the scale and reach of your media work. But focusing solely on target numbers can also be a hindrance, squashing clever campaign ideas and creativity.
  • A media strategy can have long term vision. For example: “We want to increase awareness of our organisation and focus on encouraging young people to get involved in our organisation. In the next 12 months we hope to also secure a media partnership with a youth magazine title”
  • A media strategy can also be short term and immediate. For example: “We need to recruit 10 volunteers for an event next month in Newcastle. We want to target 30 to 50 year old professionals in the city for this event”

All of these strategies have their place and can run concurrently. Have a look at the Home-Start campaign strategy. 

Predicting and planning

A strategy is there to help you be prepared so that once you’re off and running you have everything you need to hand. The more planning you get done in advance the slicker, calmer and more effective your media work will be. For example:

  • Are you going to need to find potential case studies before you start calling your target journalists?
  • Do you need to get photos together to illustrate your stories?
  • Are you going to need facts and figures to back up your volunteering campaign?
  • Do you need to get initial commitment from staff or volunteers to support you before you start booking an event?

Read about planning for a potential PR disaster in NCVO's VS Magazine article: Could you handle a media crisis?

Keys to success

Working with the media is not a science and can be infuriating. Results are not always immediate. It can take months or longer to establish a strong rapport with journalists. It can take years to increase awareness of your organisation’s work. Your media strategy is a guide to refer back to during your media/ recruitment work. That’s not to stay that fast results are impossible to achieve. More on this in the section What journalists want.

  • Be ambitious but make sure your short term targets are achievable.
  • It’s important to have milestone successes within your long term goals. Without the motivation of small successes, it’s easy to become discouraged, drop your strategy and abandon your volunteer recruitment work.
  • Set yourself realistic deadlines for achieving sections of your strategy. Allow yourself as much planning time as possible.

As you begin to build your recruitment campaign and develop your media work, you’ll need to keep revisiting your strategy. As your knowledge of the media increases and as you get to know your target volunteers make sure to keep feeding that valuable information back into your media strategy.

Find out more in Aiming your campaign at your audience (market research) and in the section What journalists want.

 

Read the next article in this section... The A to Z of advertising