[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Welcome to the Rainmaker fundraising podcast, where we bring you tips and insights to help you raise more money for your organization and lead more effectively. I'm your host, Andrew Olson.
[00:00:14] Speaker C: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. This is Andrew Olson. I'm here with Jesse Marsh. So Jesse is a longtime friend of mine, a partner in crime. She is the senior director of creative strategy at Dickerson Baker, but has been my client, my colleague, my overseas traveling buddy. Jesse, it's good to see you.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: It's great to see you, too.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: So we're going to chat today about the intersection of public relations and fundraising. But before we do that, I gave, you know, my introduction of Jesse. But tell us a little bit more about you, your background and why you do this work.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Yeah, so I've been in nonprofit for going on 25 years and worn many hats at many different nonprofits.
The last few years have been doing more consulting type work with nonprofits. And one area that I've just come to be really passionate about is that intersection of fundraising and public relations. So it's one of, one of the things that I really love to focus on.
[00:01:22] Speaker C: All right, so let's start with this.
I think there are a lot of people who think about public relations and they think press releases.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:34] Speaker C: When you think about public relations, what is what comes to mind? Like, what does it encompass and what are we missing?
[00:01:40] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think it's about.
I think it's about managing your organization's reputation.
And I think that there are times to mitigate negative impacts on a reputation, and that should be few and far between.
But what we can be doing in those times, outside of managing a crisis or a potential crisis, we can be building the reputation of the organization through relationships with the media.
So I think that there are a lot of different parts to that, and there are lots of different ways to approach it.
But I think a lot of organizations, the way they view public relations is managing a crisis. So if something bad happens, and that's usually like, oh, what do we do? You know, run around with, with our hair on fire.
So, you know, there is that side of it, and that side is super important. And I believe that every organization should have a, a plan for a general crisis. And that is something that, you know, we can do with clients is help them to develop plans like that. But in the other times when there's not, you know, the crisis happening. You mentioned press releases. And yes, if you have an event, it's great to send out a press release. But that is also a small part of it and a press release is really just a mechanism for achieving, you know, media coverage. But there are a lot of parts that go into that beyond a press release.
And so while a good PR person can competently create an effective press release, first of all, you have to have the right thing that you're telling everyone about in this press release needs to be some context. Why is this thing, whether it's an event or whether it's just something that you want to share about your organization's impact.
Why now? Why does it matter now? Why should this matter to people?
Being able to position whatever it is you're trying to promote in such a way that the media, members of the media who look at this press release are going to say, yeah, we should cover this now, so, you know, an event just for an event sake, or, hey, we serve this many people in our shelter this month. Whatever it is that you're trying to put out there, you have to contextualize that for the media.
So, for example, we like to look at things like, is there, you know, an awareness day, or sometimes they're referred to as holidays. You know, whether it's your nonprofit promotes ice cream and it's National Ice Cream Day, Things like all in for that.
[00:04:26] Speaker C: Day, by the way.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Yeah, me too. Cookie dough all the way. What's your favorite flavor?
Okay. All right. That's pretty good too.
But we want to consider the calendar. We want to consider things like what's happening in current events that make this interesting now, that make it relevant now, because it's what's happening with the organization and the impact the organization's having on the community. But in the greater context of what's happening in the world, that is what makes it more likely for a media source to cover it. If you're making an announcement just at any old time, you're going to have less activity with the media than if you can time it with something relevant, whether something happening in the news, one of these awareness days, things like that.
[00:05:16] Speaker C: So that all makes sense. I think some of the other things that I hear and see in organizations so. So first would be it's rare that I run into an organization that has like an actual strategically thought out public relations plan.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:05:35] Speaker C: Is that, is that a nice to have? Is it a have to have? Like, where do you rank that on prioritization?
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's really important to eat, to not necessarily plan out an entire year. I think that can be a good thing to do.
But so much of public relations needs to be nimble. It needs to be in response to things that are happening now. And we can't predict that very far ahead.
So we might be able to look at things like, you know, seasons, like in the summertime, we like to talk about, you know, the effect of the heat on the homeless population or something like that.
[00:06:16] Speaker C: Like kids being out of school and not having access to meals, whatever that might be.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: Exactly. So those things that happen naturally in the calendar, the season changes, major holidays, that kind of thing we can plan out or we know that our gala is at this time different events or big, big high awareness things that our organization does. So it's the things on the calendar that we're doing, but it's also the things on the calendar that just happen that everyone is experiencing together, some of which we can take advantage of.
But many times some of the best things we can do are unexpected.
So it may be a current event, it could be something exciting that happens in the media that people are covering that have to do with our organization.
We want to always be keeping an eye on. Like one of the things that you'll hear people in, in PR do say you're, you know, working for a nonprofit and you're the default PR person. Maybe it's not, you know, a full time PR manager position, but you're kind of the person who's going to write the press release if a press release is going to happen.
And you want to be tracking your organization through something like Google Alerts. So you'll want to make sure that you have your organization name in a Google Alert so that you know if anybody is talking about your organization in the media, but you also want to be setting Google Alerts for your cause and the things that are important to your organization.
So in sticking with the example of an organization that serves the homeless population, we would, if that was in a particular city, we would want to put that city and homelessness, homeless population, housing, housing insecurity, food insecurity, those types of things. Because we want to know if those subjects are being covered in the news and if there's a particular upswing with those subjects, in which case if we're a homeless shelter in a city and the issue of homelessness is getting more coverage, not only do we need to be aware of that from an operational standpoint, what we need to maybe serve homeless, we need to make adjustments in our program to account for that. We also need to be thinking about, do we need to say something.
An organization like that should be seeking to be a thought leader in their space and so when you have more activity around a cause or an issue, even if it's not organization specific, there still may be a need or at least an opportunity for the leadership of that organization to kind of weigh in on this issue. Well, here at such and such homeless shelter, we think that this is what the city needs to be doing about this situation. And here is what we're doing to serve our neighbors who don't have housing. And our recommendation would be to convene these groups to discuss this. Something like that. So sometimes there's an opportunity because of the news cycle, to speak into it and demonstrate that your organization and the leadership within it are thought leaders.
[00:09:34] Speaker C: Okay, so I've got two questions that are follow up to that. One is I. I've heard a few people say something like, well, you know, social media has really democratized this process and we don't even need the news media anymore. If we have a point of view, we'll just put it out on Facebook.
Respond to that.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Well, maybe you have 5,000 or 10,000 followers on Facebook, and if you want your audience to be fairly limited to just the people who already care about and support you enough to have gone and hit the follow button on your profile on Facebook, then yeah, you can do that. But certainly we want to be reaching other people than those who are already paying attention to what we do. And so we want to be out there in the media, ideally getting positive coverage so that we have a broader audience, but then that also elevates our brand so that we become the go to organization on that particular topic in that particular, you know, geographic region.
[00:10:38] Speaker C: Okay, great. So, and that actually leads right into my second question, which is how does, say, a nonprofit CEO position themselves to be kind of like that expert in the marketplace so that the media actually seeks them out versus them having to chase the media?
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Yep. So there's lots of ways to do that. I think that from an organizational leader's own social media accounts, it's good to be talking about these. These matters. So when something. So in very small ways, you know, if I'm on Twitter now known as X, and I'm the CEO of such and such nonprofit, whenever those, those news events are happening, when there's more coverage on things, I am going to put my, my opinion on behalf of the organization out there on my own socials, then we're going to use the organization's social profiles to do that same thing and reinforce that messaging and positioning that person as a thought leader. On that subject, we would try to get on the morning shows, we would try to get interviewed. And it has to be again, context. You can't just call them up and say, I'm the CEO of such and such organization and I want to come on your show. You have to pitch it to them in a way. Hey, this issue has been in the media. We have something to say about it. We'd love to come on and talk about it and bring more awareness to this issue and also promote the solutions that we think are most effective about this issue. There's also op eds in the papers and sometimes those are published online as well.
So there's a lot of different ways an organizational leader can get their opinion out there.
From interviews, op eds, putting out articles. You can do articles on LinkedIn now. And that is one social medium that I think more and more people are embracing that thought leadership side of it.
And so you'll see organizational leaders putting out content that is about their cause area. So there's lots of different ways to do it.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Okay friends, let's take a quick break from today's conversation and talk about your leadership. Do you ever feel stuck or like you just don't know whether you're leading well or not? I know that's something that I've felt at times during my 25 year career leading people in teams, and many of the leaders that I've coached and advised over the years have also felt that way. That's exactly why I created the 90 Day Leaders Journey email course. This course is jam packed with value to help you become a more effective and competent leader and to give you the confidence to step into any leadership opportunity.
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[email protected] let's transition this.
[00:14:10] Speaker C: Into a real conversation about like how do you how do we leverage the value of public relations to support fundraising? And what I know a lot of fundraisers would say is and not mess up my fundraising in the process. Right?
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:27] Speaker C: So talk a little bit about Kind of how, how you've approached this in the past, what you've seen work really well and maybe some things that you learn where you're like, yeah, that didn't work, let's not do that again.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: So if you think about the average, the average household is getting all kinds of direct mail pieces coming their way.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: I got seven yesterday.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: Just for context, I probably did too.
So you know, you're, you're, you're opening your mail and here are all of these requests for your support and you turn on the news that night and one of those organizations has a really interesting story about how they are approaching their cause area.
Or you go onto LinkedIn and a few people are talking about this particular thing or sharing that thought piece by a leader of an organization, those patients types of activities that happen around the time that you're seeing an appeal, that you're getting an email, that you have a solicitation, it's going to elevate that organization's name in your mind.
So it's about reinforcing what the fundraising team is putting out there. So if you know that during the holidays there's a big effort to do a year end campaign and you thoughtfully think about, well, how can we be in the news in front of our audience? And if it's a local organization, it's a little different.
The relationships with the local media, it's a little different than if you're talking about a national or global organization.
Typically organizations like that want to really focus in on their audience and what publications, what websites, what channels are their, their donor base following.
Whereas with the local organization, you want to be on the local news, you want to be in the local paper, you want to be on the local radio show, you want to be on the local morning show. So it's more mainstream media that's focused on what's happening in that particular geographical location versus more targeted publications that are likely to get in front of your audience. If you're more national focused or global.
[00:16:47] Speaker C: Okay, so follow up for that because any fundraiser who's listening to this is going to say, okay, well I know how long it takes my organization to prepare a campaign before we go into the market. Right. How do you balance like a 90 or 120 day planning window with what you said earlier about like trying to be in the moment and relevant to what's going on? Like when do you have to start those conversations with media outlets?
And I just like having not done it, like what level of control do you have to be able to say hey, don't run this until May 15th. Or like, how does that work?
[00:17:27] Speaker A: Yeah, so I think that it's about when you're pitching. And different types of publications have different cycles for how long it takes to get something out there.
A local, a local newspaper's website can have something up in an hour easily. But a monthly magazine you need to be talking to four or five months ahead of time if you want to be in that publication. So you have to kind of know the cycles of the types of news outlets that you're trying to engage with. And so, you know, if we know three months ahead of time when mail is going to be hitting mailboxes and emails are going to be hitting inboxes, then we can be thinking about, you know, we don't have to know the exact thing that's going to get us in the news, but maybe we have some things such as an event that is covered around that time. And so then you're going to want to be thinking about, well, what kind of keynote speaker do I need at this event to make it newsworthy? Do I need the mayor there? Do I need the local, you know, NFL team there? Like, what is it that's going to make this event? Because let's be honest, nobody really cares that much about a gala. But you have the right people in the room, they will cover it. Oh, we love, you know, so, and so the quarterback. So of course we're, we're going to cover it. So you want to make sure it's, it's newsworthy enough to get on the news. But you'll know. Okay, my, my gala is on this date and that comes right before our mail is going to hit in October, that sort of thing. But I think you're always watching, you're always watching the news or you're always watching for the right time to make an announcement. Because you know what, you want that messaging to be the organization, or at least if you have a good public relations plan, you would know what that message should be. And so you're just looking for the opportunity to get that messaging out there. So if the messaging is, you know, we're an after school program and you know, we have space in our programs because we just opened up three brand new sites.
So let's think through the reasons why that might be interesting. Well, some people might not have child care and they need it. So this is news to those people.
Maybe it's grant funded and so for families that qualify, it's free.
You know, maybe there's a transportation issue with, with the schools and the busing is a mess. Well, now we have this after school program which allows for parents to pick up their own children instead of children being on the bus for two hours. So there's all kinds of things just with that little snippet that you just heard that are different reasons why this could be on the news. But the messaging is, we're here. These are the great programs that we offer. This is an organization that's great to support. We need volunteers, we're enrolling new families, we're hiring.
Those are all reasons why you might want to be in the news beyond fundraising. But certainly you, you simply want your organization to be in the media for positive reasons. At the same time, your fundraising appeals are hitting so that you're top of mind to the people that are getting those solicitations.
[00:20:48] Speaker C: Okay, so we're in the midst of an election season right now, and I feel like in our country you're never not in the midst of an election season anymore.
But you know, obviously, like there's a, the, the Democratic National Convention is going on this week. There's a lot of news coverage of that.
You know, every time one of the candidates sneezes there, it seems like There's a whole 24 hour cycle devoted to it.
How does a local or even a national or a global charity that doesn't have 24 hour coverage like a campaign does, how do they compete or should they compete in the midst of, of an election season like this or any other like time when there's a massive sort of groundswell of public relations activity happening? How do you, how do you make that decision?
[00:21:40] Speaker A: So one of the things that non profits have the opportunity to be is good news.
And news outlets want to balance their political chaos and wars abroad and inflation, they want to balance that with, let's tell a story of little Jimmy and this great thing that happened with him and his dog that he got at the shelter at this animal charity. Like, everybody loves a heartwarming story. And so when the news is rife with not so great stuff, it's time to pick up the phone and call your friends over at Channel 4 and say, I've got a great feel good story for you that can cut through the clutter. Certainly. Now another tactic is to marry what you're doing with what's in the news.
They're covering it anyway. They say it's inflation. Inflation is in the news everywhere, both because of the election and it's a topic of the election, but also because inflation is high. So people are thinking about it. And you know, you're, you're constantly seeing that, you know, the close up of the hand and the gas pump, right? Like, and the, and the numbers going up, like, how many times are they going to run that?
So, you know, if you can talk about the impacts of inflation on the population of people you serve, if you are a domestic violence shelter and inflation is. Could be making it so that it is even scarier for a woman in an abusive relationship to leave because her purchasing power means less now. So even though she knows that she's not safe staying with an abusive partner, she might stay with her abusive partner because she doesn't feel that she can afford to make it work if she leaves. So it's a matter of taking whatever the issues of the day are and figuring out how. How do you talk about how. How does your organization kind of bring. Bring a slightly different spin or another aspect of this that we haven't been seeing in the news?
[00:23:56] Speaker C: Awesome. All right, so I have one more question, and then I want us to get into a little bit of an impromptu case study.
My final sort of official question is, what do you say to the nonprofit leader that says, oh, heck no, we're not talking to the media. I am scared to death that they're going to ask questions that either we can't answer or our board doesn't want us to answer, and so we're just going to kind of like, shy away and hide instead.
What, what's the upside? What's the downside?
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Well, I don't think that really happens if you're not combative with the media.
[00:24:31] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: I think if you are polite and kind and hospitable to them, most of the time, they are there to cover the feel good story. If it's a feel good story, you do not have to worry about them.
Know, gotcha journalism. They're not trying to do that. They're really not. If they came to you for a feel good story, they want to walk out that door with a feel good story.
It's not that it never happens that a nonprofit gets, you know, beat up by the media, but in my experience, if you're going to them first, you have so much more opportunity to control the story and the messaging. Now, it's a very different. It's a very different.
It's a very different situation. If you're saying, hey, do you want to cover this feel good story I have for you versus there's a crisis brewing and it's time to respond to that those should be done completely differently. Crises require their whole own set of, of rules and probably a whole different podcast episode.
If you want to talk about crisis communications, which I think is very important, but that is a very different thing. So, but, so I would say to the, to the nervous CEO who is afraid to talk to the media, if you are pitching feel good stories and your organization is on the up and up and you're transparent with your financials, I mean, I can't, you know, know what the organization is doing or not doing. All of that is in order, then there really shouldn't be a lot of fear associated with this. In a lot of years of doing this, I have really never seen a leader of an organization go into an interview expecting it to be, you know, pretty, pretty straightforward and to cover the story that we have pitched. I've never seen it go sideways. So I think with good planning and, and, and another part of that is good relationships, like I always recommend to clients that they strive to have good relationships with the media. And that is done in different ways. Everything from if you have people standing around waiting for, you know, an hour and a half for the mayor to show up to serve the first meal at the Thanksgiving dinner, give those people some water and tell them where the bathroom is, like, it's just good common sense to be kind to people that are there, you know, to do something that, that can be very beneficial to your organization. So I just advocate for people. Well, and that seems.
[00:27:08] Speaker C: That's great insight. Okay, we've got just a few minutes left before we need to wrap up, but in that time, since you've touched on crisis a little bit, I think it would be really valuable for us to go back to October 7th, 2023.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:27] Speaker C: Saturday morning, you're in Pittsburgh, I'm in Tennessee.
The entire nation of Israel is under attack. And there's a, you know, crisis of significant proportions brewing in the Middle East.
And we work with a ministry called Jews for Jesus that, that ministers to, to the Jewish people all around the world, and they have a significant presence in Israel.
Very quickly our team was called upon to help them and in part was to. Part of that was to provide PR support.
Talk to the audience a little bit about, you know, from the minute we found out what happened, sort of what your thought process is, how you approach crisis response, and what kind of things we did in that process with, with our partners and what the outcome was.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
So I think, you know, obviously the first concern when something like that happens, especially with an organization that have People ground right where it's happening is, are you okay? Is your team okay? You know, we. We just wanted to be, you know, supportive of them as people that we know who have colleagues that are right there where all of this is happening, colleagues who are being deployed into the armed services.
So certainly there's always that moment where it's just like, are you guys okay? And what can we, you know, what can we do to help across the board?
But then, you know, you have to start to think more strategically and think about, okay, this is a big story. This is going to be global news.
What does this organization have to say about this?
What do they have to share about what they're doing?
And I think that's where we were able to work with the client, to think through kind of two different ways of looking at this from a media standpoint. So one is a more, you know, really audience specific.
The people that serve this or that support this organization. So these are primarily, you know, evangelical Christians, messianic Jews who support Jews for Jesus. So that's a somewhat narrow audience. And we would talk to that audience in targeted publications like, you know, Christian magazines, Christian websites, talk about what's happening in a particular way to those news outlets. But there's a broader story, too, and along the lines of them mobilizing to make food boxes available to people who had lost their homes in the attacks, so safe places where people could come to mourn and grieve because they had lost people creating, like, toiletry and basic need boxes for soldiers that were being deployed. It doesn't matter what your perspective, you know, in the faith community is. Anybody can look at those kind of humanitarian efforts and see the value in them and how this organization's kind of uniquely positioned. They're on the ground.
They're. They're based out of the US and so there's a US Interest. There are Americans there as part of their organization, but there's also Israeli individuals that are on their staff and being called up into the armed services. So there are a lot of different angles that this could be of interest to people beyond the evangelical Christian community. And I think that's sometimes the way you have to think through these things. So it's big news because it's a. It's a huge terrorist attack on an ally of the United States. So it has continued to be in the news for. For quite some time as. As the situation unfolds. So you have this big news story, and then you want to think about who are the different audiences that might be interested in this. And so we had, you know, more of a.
A strategy more specific to the evangelical Christian community that supports them already and would be interested in what they're doing, but then the broader global community that would just be interested in the more humanitarian response.
So in terms of the results of that, there was some. Some strong media coverage right as that happened.
But as time went on and they had, you know, we. We came together with them to help them create a strategy for engaging on that particular event.
But we continued as some other things happened with that organization. For example, they got a new executive director after their previous executive director had been there for about 30 years and announced his retirement. So because we kind of put those things in place and started to move in that direction, this organ or this event happens in Israel, we were able to kind of carry that momentum so that as this new leadership took over and things are still happening in Israel pertaining to the event that happened in October, now there's even more of a reason to cover this organization. And so we're kind of already mobilized in that direction, you know, helping their. Their staff to kind of build their PR muscle as we move forward. And so as different developments have happened over time, over the last seven, eight months, nine months since that happened, you know, they're gaining coverage from. From lots of things that they're doing now because they were mobilized right as that happened.
[00:33:10] Speaker C: That's awesome. Okay, so we're. We're just about out of time. I'm going to spring one more question on you, and that is if. If there's somebody listening who's like, yeah, I know I need to do this. What do I do to start? What are the first two or three things you'd recommend?
[00:33:25] Speaker A: Just give us a call.
There are. There are many things that I think what we can do is come alongside a client and help them decide with the staff they have, with the resources they have without spending a whole bunch of extra money. You know, what can be done with the current situation? I think that's one thing that we can help an organization to kind of map out those things all the way up to a very comprehensive, you know, annual PR plan with all kinds of plans for different types of things that could happen in the news. But I think if you're doing it on your own, and I think if you're sitting there and you're, you know, the development director, nonprofit that doesn't have any PR staff at all, I would say one, set a Google alert for your organization and Google alerts for all of those key terms that are around your cause area, those different words that you're going to see in the news. And so then you're going to have that Google alert come to your inbox every day. So you're monitoring is there more or less coverage about the things that matter to us as an organization and then starting to put content out there that is thought leadership and whether it's coming from the CEO, sometimes there's another person in the organization that it makes sense for that kind of content to come through. But whoever that person is, that that should be putting thought leadership out there, you can start on LinkedIn. You can start on the blog of your organization.
You can pitch an op ed to, you know, a paper that covers the cause area that you're, that you're involved with. Those are probably the easiest ways to start. Those would be my recommendations.
[00:35:11] Speaker C: Awesome. That's great. Well, Jesse, thank you for being here. If someone wants to talk to you about public relations in their organization, how do they reach you?
[00:35:18] Speaker A: You can reach
[email protected].
[00:35:23] Speaker C: Awesome. And I'm assuming they can also find you on LinkedIn?
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Yes, you can also find me on LinkedIn. Jessica Marsh.
[00:35:29] Speaker C: Sweet. All right, thank you so much for being here.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: Happy to be here. Thanks.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Rainmaker fundraising podcast. I have two favors to ask before I let you go. First, if you enjoyed this episode, please rate us and review us on whatever podcast platform you use to listen to this show. It'll help us reach more people with the tips and insights that you find most valuable. My second favor is a little bit.
[00:35:59] Speaker C: Of a favor to ask, but also.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: A little bit of a gift to you. I write a daily substack newsletter called the Leadership Growth Newsletter. It's free to you and I write it to help people lead more effectively and in both life and at work. I'd love for you to click the link in the show notes and subscribe to that newsletter as well. Until next time, friends. I hope you make it a great day.
