communication department

Volume XX Number 1

Creating a Chapter Publicity Plan

By Garret Romaine, Associate Fellow, Willamette Valley Chapter, and Member, Public Relations Committee

Editor’s note: This is the first article in a two-part series on generating publicity for your community. An upcoming issue of Tieline will feature the second article in the series, which will contain links to helpful templates and documents that may help your community in its publicity efforts.

To be truly effective in generating publicity for the year, virtual and geographic community leaders need to roll up their sleeves and dig in early. What you need is a plan. Even if your leadership team takes the summer off, there are things you can do early in your tenure that will organize your publicity effort and make sure it works smoothly.

One way to get a head start (or a jump start) on your planning is to take advantage of the STC public relations competition. Designed to promote excellence in the way we communicate to the outside world, the PR competition is full of guidelines for best practices. Check out the “Rules for the STC Public Relations Competition” (available in PDF format from the STC Web site) to get an idea of the questions you should be able to answer with a good plan. For example, can you state your goals, objectives, and timetable for a specific event or service?

Putting together a publicity plan can be very simple. If so, what are the priorities and who will be responsible for each one? Or, your plan may be quite complex as you weave together press releases, personality profiles, and interview schedules. Either way, the best advice is to start by making a plan. This article outlines how to draft a plan that will serve you well.

Premeeting Planning

The first thing to do is to start developing ideas for your publicity planning meeting. Decide on a central location and pick a date that is at least a couple of weeks away. It is important to get attendance nailed down early. Creating a publicity plan is a great team-building exercise, so make sure you have the right team there. For example, you could just start with a lunch and pull together some of the top officers who will be involved. Or, you could sponsor a potluck dinner and meet at someone’s house. If worse comes to worst, carve out a forty-five-minute block of time after the next chapter council or program meeting.

Depending on the size of your chapter, you might have your publicity chairperson, someone from the Web team, your vice president, and perhaps your competition manager at your first meeting. Add in the past president and you’ve got a powerful working group that can help line up the year.

To prepare for such a meeting, the organizer could start with a simple Word or Excel document that highlights known events. Compiling a list of dates that require publicity will start framing the scale of the task. But the calendar dates are only half the problem. Some tasks require an up-front effort that may not have been completed recently. That’s why a face-to-face meeting is so helpful—the president can quickly assess the strength of the resources available and delegate tasks that help assess abilities.

In order to create a publicity plan, a chapter must be reasonably organized. Larger chapters should have a chapter handbook that describes in detail the responsibilities of each officeholder and manager. Smaller chapters may combine duties, leaving a smaller pool of talent to call on, but often the volunteers are more committed and wear multiple hats. Either way, if these roles aren’t well understood, organizing a publicity plan may be difficult, so make sure participants know what is expected from their volunteer time before they attend your team-building session. That involves requiring RSVPs and then calling each interested party.

A second premeeting activity to conduct before the planning session is a quick inventory of your publicity tools. Here’s a starter list:

1. An updated list of publicity contacts, (and, for extra credit, a notation of when they were last contacted)
2. Templates for press releases and announcements
3. Photographs of all current chapter officers (or at least the chapter president) in both color and black-and-white

A “nice-to-have” item would be a summary from the most recent publicity committee chair, documenting the activities and results undertaken. Barring that, a quick e-mail exchange or phone conversation would at least let the chapter president know how good, or bad, the current situation is.

Team Building and Goal Setting

Your goal for the first team-building exercise is to set the big picture: who is doing what, by when. You should identify a series of initial tasks, set names beside those tasks, and schedule follow-up meetings to reconvene.

We all know how life can intrude on volunteer organizations; for example, the energetic new committee chair could get transferred to a distant city. Think about contingencies and backups, but don’t get too bogged down in planning minutia. Set the general themes and then stay flexible.

For example, these steps might be a good start:

1. Update (or create) the PR contacts list by contacting each member of the list personally and introducing the chapter and the chapter schedule; also, mention that the chapter president is available for interviews (PR committee chair)
2. Collect sample press releases and make sure your template is up to date (PR committee member)
3. Organize a photo shoot of the chapter officers; digital is fine, but make sure you get both color and black-and-white images if possible (first vice president)
4. Develop a generic publicity plan for a chapter meeting, emphasizing the subject, the speaker, his or her qualifications, the venue, etc. Identify how to circulate the information, who needs it, and how soon it is needed (PR committee chair)
5. Identify a priority list of chapter activities that require publicity, including competitions, nationally known speakers, workshops, new officers, etc. (chapter president)

Armed with these five tasks and job descriptions for the meeting participants, and energized by good leadership, your publicity team should be able to draft a publicity plan that will build a solid foundation for the year ahead. Circulate the draft electronically, gather feedback, contact an interested STC director or other national officer, and you should be able to start getting some buzz going.

Organization Helps in the Long Run

If just reading this has made your head swim with ideas for things you should have already accomplished, don’t despair. Getting your planning activities going will start to pay off as soon as you begin. Getting organized with templates, names, and dates will help you in the long run, and help those who come after you.

If you want to really jump-start your planning activities, consider making the public relations competition traveling exhibit a part of your annual schedule. Show it off at the same time you exhibit the winners of the international or newsletter competition, but, either way, try to institutionalize the event so that every year your chapter sees “best practices” in the field of public relations planning. When you toss in a little long-term planning with all the short-term work you do, you can really make a difference.