Not everyone can afford to hire an on-staff public relations professional or pay for an outside public relations counsel. And most marketing people in small or medium sized companies lack the training and experience to do effective public relations as a part of their overall marketing strategy.

Sorry, folks, I’m an ex-daily newspaper reporter and have been a public relations agency counsel for more than 30 years. You may think you can, but the vast majority of you lack the appropriate skills.

If you’re a member of a professional or industry trade organization, why don’t you encourage or demand that your association does it for you? Let me give you an example of how that can work.

Right now, we represent a major state wine organization with 35 winery members selling products within their state. We provide overall branding support and public relations for the industry, touting the quality of the product and its producers. No big surprise, right?

But we also support the public relations efforts of EACH individual winery as part of our service. When an individual winemaker wants to promote an event, we provide publicity and counsel. When the organization sponsors a statewide event, we provide media relations support to each individual winery in its market area. This support is covered in the monthly retainer of the association. Members who have embraced the program have seen dramatic results in profitability and exposure. And they are taking the information developed as news releases and media alerts and posting the content on their websites, using it for simple direct mail and even incorporating it into simple ads.

Non profs and trade organizations are always looking for new ways to serve existing members and lure new ones into the fold. But how many non profs or trade organizations—particularly ones with small and medium-sized companies—have thought about doing THIS for their members?

It makes perfect sense, particularly for smaller trade organizations whose members don’t have the financial means to mount their own continuing public relations campaigns. A modest monthly retainer for agency public relations can easily cost $3,000 and up. For that same amount, you can be covering the public relations program for your organization’s overall industry branding AND support your members with their individual efforts.

If you’re a non profit or a member, think about what it might do for your organization and its members.

We guide them just as we would guide any singular client in developing their campaigns. And we provide them with timely, media relations support for their activities. Not every agency can do this. You inevitably need an agency staff with journalism experience to be able to do this cost efficiently and correctly.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.