Distribute Your Press Releases Directly to Journalists
Use a spreadsheet or database program to record and continuously update the contact information and interests of the reporters that might share your perspective with a mass audience. Lavish attention (i.e., personalization, helpful resources, and follow-up phone calls) on the most influential and widely read.
The easy way to create a list of relevant reporters is to buy a subscription to a media contacts database provided by Bacons, BurrellesLuce, or Vocus, starting at approximately $2,000 per year. These companies provide media contact information, media monitoring, and press release distribution via email and/or fax. You'll be impressed by the available targeting criteria, such as "beat" (topic area), region, audience size, and preferred contact method. However, caveat emptor: Before you buy a subscription to any of these media contact databases, take advantage of their free demos to investigate how many reporters they track for the topic(s) related to your cause. Ask for a nonprofit discount.
The more difficult (and potentially more effective) way to create a contact list of relevant reporters is to use a media-monitoring clipping service or to search a news article database, such as Lexis Nexis (http://www.lexisnexis.com/getarticlecase/), by keyphrase and proximity. For instance, you might target reporters who wrote an article during the past 18 months that included the phrases "malpractice insurance" and "obstetrics" within 25 words. Or, you might search for articles in the past 60 days that included "landmines" or "land mines" and "children" within 50 words. To find the most relevant articles (and therefore the most relevant reporters) for your cause, experiment with keyphrase combinations. Along with topic-specific keyphrases, be sure to also test the name of your organization, ally organizations, and opposing organizations. Using this approach to identify journalists and their publications is relatively quick; the time-consuming part of this task is appending the contact information, either by scouring the publications' websites or by calling each publication individually. This could be a good task for PR interns or for volunteers. Or, this could be your rationale to invest in a media-contact database subscription.
Make Bulk Email or Fax Distribution Appear to be Personal
"Press release spam" is the bane of a journalist's existence. Since journalists prefer exclusives, they are less responsive to emails when the "to" field includes multiple email addresses, or when their own email address appears in the "cc" or "bcc" fields.
Fortunately, you don't have to email or fax your press releases individually, thanks to Microsoft Word's Mail Merge feature, which makes it possible to quickly send out hundreds or thousands of individual emails or faxes that appear to be personal.
The personalization should include at least the reporter's email address and first name, but will be even more effective if you incorporate additional fields from your media contact spreadsheet or database, such as the name of the reporter's column.
For instance, the email introduction to your press release might read:
Hi <<First-name>>,
Next week's movie release of Oil Wars will likely enrage your <<Column>> readers. However, a study published today by the nonpartisan Glentworth Institute provides new facts and a compelling rebuttal.
