If you want to increase your chances of media coverage, make sure your story has a compelling visual. For TV it’s a must and for print, it sure helps if you hope for a nice, big photo accompanying your story. (Check out the photo in the Bemidji Pioneer of a community garden – it really draws the reader into the story.)

Nonprofit News Tip #3: Make Your Story Visual

Pay attention to your local news: Spend some time watching your local TV news, and you’ll notice that TV, being a visual medium, needs some sort of visual to help tell the story. Make a television reporter’s job easier by providing them with those visuals at the press event.

Action shots help. Photographers and cameramen like action. It’s more fun to shoot and more interesting to watch. Just check out the shot of this guy surfing on Lake Michigan in Chicago.

Make the visual central to the event. Sometimes the entire staging of the event can provide the visual–take a look at the bake sale that education groups and parents held at the Capitol on Wednesday to call for more K-12 funding. The anchor even introduces the story by saying that parents headed to the Capitol to fight for school funding “in a very visual way.”

Pick a location that illustrates the story. Other times, the visual can be the location where the actual press conference is being held. In February, Minnesota 2020 released a statewide report on No Child Left Behind. We held many of the those press events at schools in local communities to provide a nice backdrop for television.

Blow up a poster that highlights a key message. Or, if you’re releasing a report and there isn’t a compelling visual image, blow up a nice chart or graph to provide something for photographers to shoot. This KAAL TV story in Rochester on Minnesota 2020′s report on LGA cuts actually leads with a shot of one of the posters that illustrates a key finding of the report. It reinforces the message and provides a nice image.

Put a face on the story. And finally, as I discussed in the first Nonprofit News Tip, make someone available who can put a human face on the story. This person provides emotional interest, as well as someone to photograph other than your executive director.

B-roll? Sometimes TV stations will beef up a story with B-roll (background shots of something like kids in a classroom or the Capitol building that relate to the story) or with additional interviews, but you can’t always count on a reporter spending the time to do this. Some organizations provide B-roll for reporters, but this is often too costly for nonprofits to do. However, if you only work one issue such as renewable energy, you may want to consider producing some generic footage of wind farms to hand out at press events.

The more “one stop shopping” you can provide reporters with at your press event, the better chance you have of getting featured on the evening news.

Like

Unlike

Tags: media, news tips, Newspapers

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under News, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.