Companies often align with non-profit partners to make a positive impact in the world and help enhance their reputation among target audiences. These partnerships often involve fundraising events. Once your company has selected a non-profit partner, securing media coverage of a fundraising event can drive people to participate and spread goodwill in the community. But securing news coverage of your fundraiser is not always guaranteed, especially as more and more companies look for ways to stand out among cause-driven consumers.
Although the non-profit partner plays a significant role in fundraiser performance, there are many factors that could impact whether media will cover your company giving back.
Here are four tips to help maximize pitching efforts and gain traction with media:
- Time it right. When considering timing for your fundraiser, be sure you can answer, “Why now?” Whether helping to fill an immediate need in a time of crisis or celebrating a holiday, timeliness is a major contributor to making your fundraiser relevant to media. Hosting a fundraiser for a heart health organization? Schedule it during Heart Health Month in February. Has a major disaster impacted your community? Move quickly to help meet the needs of those affected.
- Define your audience. Defining who the audience is for your fundraiser will help you decide who to pitch. A single-location fundraiser might work for a hyper-local publication but is likely not going to resonate as well with media in a major market because it doesn’t impact enough viewers or readers. If, however, you are hosting fundraisers in multiple locations across an entire city or state, it not only increases the scale of the fundraiser, but also allows a larger chunk of the audience in that market to participate. This larger potential impact will make the fundraiser a bigger deal for media and their audience.
- Specify the benefit. If proceeds from the fundraiser are going toward a specific cause within the non-profit, be sure to highlight that in your outreach materials. For example, if raising funds for a health charity, and the funds will benefit a local child in need of medical care, specify this when contacting reporters. Doing so will not only help localize the story, but also give a face to the cause and your event.
- Find a spokesperson. Always be sure to ask if there are beneficiaries of the organization that are willing to speak to media and explain how they’ve been helped by the partner. This makes the organization’s mission more tangible for reporters and their audience. Spokespeople within the organization are also great assets and can better communicate to media what their organization does, how it will benefit from your fundraiser, and how that impacts the community as a whole.
