If one of your aims for 2011 is to boost your organisation’s profile in the media, the temptation is probably to get out there, get going and start telling newspapers and broadcasters how fantastic you are and what great stories you can provide.
But if you really want to promote your stories well, and ensure they get the coverage they deserve, you need to prepare. You need what I describe as a ‘media toolkit’.
After all, if a journalist contacts you and is interested in covering a particular story, but only if you can supply them with particular background material or interesting photos, you don’t want to be scrabbling round to find what they need, and miss their deadline.
You want to have it all at your finger tips, so you can whizz everything over to them pronto:
Some of these will never change, others, you’ll need to adapt on a story by story basis.
- A brief background of your organisation including successes, key clients, and milestones in its story and any little quirky details that might capture the imagination
- Biographies of key players
- Photos of key players, products and the services you provide. As far as possible, these should be professionally shot and not just head shots.
- Case studies of how you’ve helped clients plus testimonials
- Interviewees from within your company who are confident about talking to journalists, and who can be relied on to convey your organisation’s key messages
- Customers/supporters/celebrity fans who are happy to be interviewed or quoted about how great you are
- A promotion video to showcase what you do, plus some ‘Stock shots’ ie footage of your business at work, what it’s all about, what it does and what it’s achieved,
Once you’ve got all this ready to go, you’ll all set to go out there, find some great stories and tell the world!
Ann
by 
[…] 91 percent of journalists said that having easy access to relevant background, biographies, and supporting information is very important when researching a story – the contents of your Media Toolkit. […]