How to Get Your Charity or NGO in Newspaper Articles

Michal Siewniak

One of the best people I have ever had the opportunity to work with, and now a personal friend of mine, is Michal Siewniak. This man has the energy of a lion, he is like a vortex of happiness and he gets people doing things! I believe everyone involved in community work in Hertfordshire has heard of Michal one way or another! He has done some amazing work over the past 4 years (some of which I will talk about in future posts) since he has been involved in community work, but one of the key things he is very good at is his excellent relationship with the media. The pile of newspaper articles he has been in stands over a foot tall, and this is just articles from the past 2 years! Newspapers he was featured in vary from local papers to UK based Polish national papers. I was invited to speak at the ERLAI Conference in Brussels in March 2011 about cases of good practice around engaging the media to foster integration. I immediately thought of Michal Siewniak and in fact invited him along to do the presentation with me! It appears our double act was very successful, as a month later I was invited by Italian Region of Puglia and an NGO in Rome called CITTALIA to share cases of good practice at the +RESPECT Conference and three of their seminars: one in Brussels and two in Rome. If you want your charity to appear more in the newspapers to publicise your work and generate some interest, here are six key things I learnt from Michal’s experience of working with the media as well as other organisations that have had successes in this area:

Michal and I at ERLAI
Conference in Brussels

1. Contact them! Charities and Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) find that often the same people attend meetings, events or seminars over and over again, and they need other means of making their work known to a wider audience. It may sound as a no-brainer; however one of the best ways of doing that is by contacting your local newspaper and asking them if they could publish an article. Write the article first, make sure it is very clear and to the point, proofread it and put your organisation’s contact details at the end, so people can get in touch!

2. Use influential people! If you find it hard to get through to your local paper or to get them to publicise your article (or even attend your events), you can start the ball rolling by inviting them to meetings or events you run where influential people attend. Most will be happy to come out and write an article about your project if the Mayor or local MP attends! You could find then that most influential people also have reporters that they have a good relationship with, so you could get more links that way.

Michal and Housing Minister,
Grant Shapps at Westminster

3. A direct line is always best! Once you get a newspaper reporter to your event, you have the opportunity to forge a relationship, personal contact is always better than an email! Now you have a contact you can speak to within a newspaper and you can email them directly articles to publish the work of your charity. Like in every aspect of business (despite being a charity or not for profit organisation, everything works on the principles of running a business), maintain the relationship with your contact via phone and email even if you don’t have a particular article in mind to send them, that way you will keep the relationship fresh!

4. The story matters! Be prepared to put your charity or NGO’s name and fame on the back seat when writing an article – people (and therefore, newspapers) are interested in the story, in “what happened”?, and more often than not, they are not going to be drawn to an article that reads: “charity does good work” because charities are there to do just that. However, they are going to be drawn to an article that talks about a story, about something that happened! People love stories, that is why the film industry is so successful!

Michal and I at EU Parliament
Brussels October 2010

5. Put your business hat on! Speak to your local paper, see what they are interested in, try to learn “their side of the story”, what motivates and interests them. Michal found that one of the newspapers he made links with (through one of the influential people he had at his events) was interested in running articles in mirror pages: one in English and the other in Polish, so the next community event Michal run had a massive two pages feature in the newspaper, one in each language. Michal was pleased as this meant that Polish people could use this as an opportunity to learn English, seeing the same article written in both languages, whilst the newspaper was interested in expanding their customer base to the Polish community, so they can sell more newspapers.

6. You never know who is reading! A story that appeared in a newspaper in Romania about the Roma Community Project in Marza, Dolj (Romania) (again, it was about the project, not the NGO which run it) attracted a massive amount of anonymous funding, as well as government funding, as a direct result of the newspaper articles they appeared in! From the first article that appeared, it spiralled into many other articles, some even covering two pages, and this made the project even more known and more successful, so more press coverage was created and so on and so on.
I hope you find the tips above useful and if you discover other ways to get your work in the paper and would like to share them, please send me an email at adelina@benadec.co.uk and let me have YOUR story.