Publicity Tips for Non-Profits
Publicity for any organization or business is essential. What keeps you running is the involvement people have with you, the support people lend to you, basically you can't run on your own. You're made up of lots of people.
Publicity is what brings those people in. The more people involved, the more successful you will become.
If people see your name in the newspaper, hear your name on the radio, see you at work on the news they will become familiar with you.
They could also become familiar with you through small things like receiving a flyer, hearing a friend tell about you, seeing advertisements posted. If they are familiar with you, they are a lot more likely to want to be a part of what you do.
So it can be seen that publicity is a major part of helping any organization or business to run.
Non-profits are one of those organizations. They want to do good, but in order to do good, they need people to help them. They need volunteers, they need funds, they need to be able to run their program.
There are several things that you can do as a nonprofit organization to get your name out and make people aware of you. One is through press releases. You can inform the public of things you are doing. You can inform them when you are looking for volunteers.
If the public sees your name often, they will feel like you are a part of what they do and they will join in to help you and support you.
The radio is also an important tool. Some people receive the newspaper but are too lazy or to busy to pick it up and read through it.
For these people, they would be easier to reach on the radio. Most people listen to the radio while driving to work, driving around town, cleaning house, or just doing things that require them but not a lot of thinking. If they are listening to the radio and hear about you and what you are doing, you will get them interested.
Or there are those people like my grandma who are mostly home all day and watch every hour of the news. People who, if they saw or heard a story about you on the news, would be more than eager to join in and help.
Other more simple ways of getting publicity are in simple things. Like flyers for example. If you were to pass out flyers talking about your organization, why you exist, what you do, and ways that anyone could help you, a lot of people would be more than happy to do it.
All they need is someone to tell them what to do. If they hear about you and want to help, but don't have information of how to help, they probably won't put in the effort to find out. They may try, but in their busy lives, if just might not ever come about.
So you have to make sure people know how to help. You have to always keep them updated on things that they can get involved in.
It is likely that most people will be able to be reached through newspapers, radio and t.v., but a lot of people can also be reached through things like flyers and word of mouth.
Word of mouth may not sound that effective, but if it is interesting information that is being passed a long, it is incredible how fast it will go.
If someone likes what you are doing they will get their friends to join in, who in turn will tell family and so on and so forth until there is a vast amount of people that want to join in your cause.
