Small Charities Week – top PR tips for small charities
19th to 23rd June marks Small Charities Week. As a communications agency that works with purposeful charities, we wanted to share our top PR tips for small charities. Small charities are defined by an income of less than £1 million. 97% of UK registered charities fall under this bracket, so there’s a lot of them out there.
Many charities are seeing donations limited and overheads increasing. We recently held a free webinar on how charities can create an impact using PR in a cost-of-living crisis. You can rewatch it here.
Top PR tips for small charities:
1. Find different ways to engage and connect with audiences
With personal and business budgets tighter than ever, it’s important to find varied ways to engage and connect with audiences. This could be by targeting new audiences on social media, reaching out to different media outlets, or more.
2. Don’t rule out national coverage
Just because your charity is small or local, doesn’t mean you’re not interesting and inspiring. It’s easy to rule out national coverage, but you shouldn’t underestimate the impact it can have, especially syndicated content which is shared across numerous publications. For example, our client, St Ann’s Hospice, are local to Manchester, but a story about one of their fundraisers made national headlines, resulting in the fundraiser being cast in an Adidas campaign. You can read more about Barbara and her money-raising efforts here.
3. Don’t just plan around awareness days
Whilst they can be a good way to boost donations, especially around Christmas and Easter, awareness days press releases are often over saturated, as businesses use them to create a news hook. Unless you really have something newsworthy to say about National Coffee Day, we would advise sticking to the main events in the year.
4. Repurpose content
This one is especially important if you are outsourcing any sort of content creator, be it a marketing specialist, social media expert or copywriter. Repurposing your content across channels will save you a lot of time, and potentially money, as you can reuse a press release as a blog post, turn video or photo content into social media posts and more.
5. Don’t forget about shops (if you have them)
Shops can be a great way to reach out to a wider audience, as demonstrated earlier this year with Oxfam’s collaboration with Glastonbury Festival. If you have shops, it can be worth considering a collaboration, even on a local scale, with another business that could help to boost donations through encouraging people to visit your shops and convert those visitors into sales and potentially even longer-term supporters.
If you would like to speak further on PR advice for your business, get in touch with the High-Rise team here.