 Hi everybody, my name is Cindy bank and I'm the associate director of the program and practical policy engagement here at the Gerald our Ford school public policy. I want to welcome everyone. We're really excited about this event because not only do we have our Ford school community joining us, but we also have colleagues from around campus and a number of community partners that work with various offices around campus so we're really happy to have you all here. I am thrilled today to have two of my colleagues going Slater and Mara Osfeld, who work over a poverty solutions are here to present and I forgot of course I want to thank my colleague Mariam the garden who is behind the scenes and you'll see some chats coming up from her throughout the presentation. But thank you, Marion, and I'm going to turn this over to Mara and Lauren now, and thank you all again for joining and thank you for tomorrow. All right, thank you to Cindy and Miriam for having us and for helping to put on this event. We're really excited to be able to just share some information and hopefully answer a lot of the questions from the people who are in attendance. I really want to make sure that this is a useful workshop and that you come away with a lot of practical tools that you can use so I think Mariam will have some instructions for putting your questions in the chat. Mara and I are open to taking questions during the presentation and we'll also leave some time for Q&A at the end. So let me go ahead and share my screen and we will get started here. All right, how does that look for everybody. Thank you. I'm having trouble seeing the Zoom participants. So yes, someone could interject and let me know if there's an issue that would be appreciated. So I wanted to start off with just asking how many people here have worked in journalism in the past or communications. Maybe you've just been interviewed by a journalist just want to get a sense of what people's familiarity is with working with the media. And then here are our goals for our session today. So you want to just enhance your understanding of the media environment and what reporters are looking for. We'll do an exercise to help you sharpen your point and just work on some messaging. We'll clarify the rules of engagement with journalists. Review some tips and techniques for interviews and just hopefully leave you feeling really confident so that you can all in the interview. So we'll start with just talking about a communications plan. Having this plan can help you answer a few important questions that will really set you up for success in terms of getting your work where it needs to go and translating it in a way that works for your target audiences. It's just a strategic way to think through your communications goals. So I'm going to ask clarifying questions and it can be really helpful and just getting everybody on your team on the same page so that you have consistency in the message that you're putting out to the public. You can use a communications plan for like an advocacy campaign, the launch of a project and event you want to promote a research project that you're presenting on all sorts of different cases. It has a public engagement component. It can be really helpful to take time for this planning and your strategy can be really robust like if you're doing a national campaign, but it can also be really simple. So poverty solutions we don't necessarily write out a formal communication strategy for every single project that we release, but we're certainly thinking through these components and having conversations about them. So it's really up to you just kind of what works for your project. So here are kind of the basic components that you'll want to have in your communications plan. You'll start with just the plan for this project that can serve as an internal project summary to get everyone up to speed. It's really helpful, especially so I get poverty solutions if we're putting out like a multi-year research project to just have a little summary of what are the the central research questions who on our staff has been involved in it. And also, you know, sometimes we'll list if there's a certain funder that's been involved just so we know kind of who the key players are in what's the summary of this project. So goals for your communications plan can be similar to your programmatic goals, but then you'll want to take it a step further and think about the specific communications outcomes that you're looking for. So an example might be to raise awareness of an issue among service providers in order to improve programming. So you've kind of started to hint at who are you trying to reach and what's the impact that you're hoping to have. And that will be something really specific like you want to generate more web traffic to a certain page on your website, you're hoping to get a lot of earned media coverage, or maybe you want to boost your social media presence. So you can list all of those types of things in your goals on your communications plan. Messaging is really the most important part of your plan. That's going to be the key to getting people's attention and getting them interested in what you're sharing. And so we're going to do an activity a little bit later that will help you just think through your messaging and what that can look like. So everyone on your team ideally to know these messages by heart so that they can just be, you know, consistently sharing the same thing across the board and you don't have to worry about kind of deviations or people getting lost in the weeds, as they're talking about your project. And then your target audiences are also really important and so you'll want to spend some time really drilling down into who exactly you're trying to reach. Generally, the more specific you can be about your target on audiences, the better your target audience is not the general public, you'll need to be more specific than that. And once you kind of get an idea of who your audiences are, maybe it's policymakers, if you can be even more specific is it state policymakers local government federal policymakers. So if you want to start drafting some value propositions of how does this information that you're sharing benefit this target audience, what problem doesn't help them solve what action do you want them to take after they receive the information. So they're kind of just four basic pieces to get you started as you're putting together your communications plan. So just think about the components, the tactics that you're going to use to actually relay your messages to your target audiences. This can be a lot of different things it can take a lot of different forms. A website is often a good kind of just place to collect a lot of information. So, a lot of times in our communications efforts will have a landing page on our website, or someplace online that that we're sending people back to so they can follow up and get working with the media is a great way to get your message out and we'll spend the second half of this workshop talking more specifically about how to do that. You can have all types of different collateral fact sheets handouts data visualizations, social media graphics video. In social media, you also want to be thinking about other are there certain channels where your target audiences are most engaged and where can you meet them where they're already spending a lot of time and sharing information. Internal sharing is also really important, you want to make sure that everybody on your team knows what you're about to share publicly, and especially at a decentralized organization like you have. It's really important to loop in other departments that might have some overlap with the work that you're doing or the specific topic that you're working on, just so that people have a head up and they can also potentially help amplify your messages and spread the word to their networks to them. And internally you'll want to identify your key spokespeople and make sure that they're available. And you know once you do this public launch to talk about your project or topic. It can also be helpful to have some spokespeople who are outside of your organization that can just add to the credibility where it's not just us saying that here's one of our partners who's also talking about how useful this information can be. And we'll talk a little bit more about getting to the point and really honing in on the message that messages that you want to be sharing as part of your communications plan. I think one thing, especially in academia is we can fall into kind of the curse of knowledge like if you have been studying something for years, putting a lot of work into a project into a paper that you've been working on. It can be challenging to then take a step back and think about for someone who's coming to this issue fresh brand new with no prior knowledge. What's the most important thing for them to know about this. And so that's where having these really clearly defined points can be very helpful. So point is a proposition that you can make a case for it's beyond a topic like student homelessness. It's, it's a point that you can make in terms of what exactly you're trying to get people to know about this topic. And so when you're dealing like I said if you're dealing with complex or nuanced policy issues. This can be a challenge but it's really worth putting in the time to hone in on those messages. And so I'm going to queue up a an activity where we will give you each a chance to try this out for yourselves. So watch a video to kind of guide you through the instructions for the activity. And while that's playing if you can kind of be thinking of a point that you might want to make. This can be a research paper that you're working on a presentation. A project that you've been been working on an event that you have coming up anything that you might want to share publicly. And you can be thinking about what would your target audiences be. What would the value proposition be for them. And so this video will walk us through it. This is my colleague Elise Arbaugh from the Center for Academic Innovation and this will just explain how it's going to work. Hi, in this video, we're going to demonstrate for you a simple and quick technique that we use to discover the central message that we sometimes want to communicate to different audiences or in different situations. The exercise is called Half Life Your Message. Half Life Your Message is really easy. You stand up and for 60 seconds you talk fluidly about whatever topic you want. And then immediately after that 60 seconds is done, you have to start over. But here's the catch. You only get half the time. Now importantly, when you start over, you're not it or you're iterating on the exact same topic. You're not starting over from scratch and talking about something new. So you do 60 seconds, then you start over and do 30 seconds and then immediately after that you do it again in 15 and then again in 8. Now the two key pieces of this is that you really should be standing up and you really don't want to give yourself any time to pause between the 60, 30, 15, 8 second versions. Yep. So we're just going to launch right into it. Elise is going to demo it and I've got my phone right here and we're going to time it so that she'll get markers at the 60 second point, the 30 second point, the 15 second point and the 8 second point so that she can track how long it's taking her. So you ready to do this? I need a topic. So your topic is and by the way, she doesn't know what this is. So this is completely improvised. Just want to show you that you can do this without any preparation. So your topic is talk a little bit. You're an expert in communicating and helping people to communicate better. Talk a little bit about the importance of practicing communications to become better at it. Okay, so I'll give you a couple seconds to think about it. I'm going to make sure my phone's all set with the timer. All right. So you ready to go? All right. Three, two, one, go. So most people when they look at me today don't believe that by nature I'm a total introvert and that I actually was not at all effective in public speaking for a really long time. In high school, my favorite thing was to check out a big pile of books from the library and spend a weekend not talking to anybody but just like curled up in my bedroom just reading. And it wasn't really until I got into some of my research experiences and started watching really effective communicators that I decided that I wanted to become more effective at public speaking. But then there was a conundrum. And that conundrum was that I had no idea how to get from where I was which was sort of quiet and mouse like and not particularly effective to being really effective. And the answer that I landed on was in focusing on specific skills and getting lots and lots and lots of practice. And that practice is I think really critical because you can't actually get better at something until you work the muscle to develop the skill. And with that and with consistent feedback you really can get better at communicating. Two and one. Nicely done. All right. So we're going to do the exact same thing, same core message, but this time only in 30 seconds. You ready? Got it. Go. All right. So when people look at me today they don't necessarily believe that in high school I used to be really introverted and I didn't really know effectively how to be a good speaker. It wasn't really until I started thinking about how to break down communication skills and really starting to practice that I started getting better. And I think that this is really critical as people are learning to communicate to get lots and lots of practice and lots and lots of feedback as they're developing their skills so that they can become a better communicator. Great. All right. 15 second version. Deep breath. Ready. Set. Go. So by nature I'm not actually a particularly effective communicator and when I was learning how to be an effective communicator the key thing for me was doing lots of practice and getting lots and lots of feedback. I think that this is really critical as people develop their communication skills which are skills. All right. Nice. All right. Pro tip. Go for the eight. Eight second version. Let's do it. All right. Go. By nature I am not a particularly effective communicator but I learned to be an effective communicator by practicing and integrating a bunch of feedback. And there's the eight second mark. Nicely done. All right. So now you all will get a chance to try that. You'll go through a 60 30 15 and eight second version of your message. Maryam's going to send us into breakout rooms. It'll just be two person two people in a room. So one person can go through and deliver their message and all of its versions and then you'll switch and have the other person do it. You can just hopefully use a timer on your phone or on your laptop or device, whatever you're joining this zoom meeting from. So yeah we'll go into breakout rooms to do that and then we will come back as a full group to debrief, and then I'll turn it over to Mara to get more into how to work with journalists specifically. So hopefully you will stick around after the activity for that. Lauren there was a question about whether people will assign one another topic. No, the idea is that you will just come with your own topic, whatever you want to talk about. It can be yeah they sent something that you're working on or just something you're interested in. Should we move people around so that no one's by I see some people in rooms by themselves. Yeah, I'll do that. I think some people didn't want to participate so I'm going to move. And I think everybody else should have. Yeah I think Bonnie is the only one. Yeah everybody else should have another partner now. So, oh, maybe not hang on. I think room eight. Yeah, that just changed. Room eight has to room nine has to room 10 something somebody I think just left. Yeah, hang on a second. I'm going to move okay Kelly I'm going to move you to room 10. Oh she hasn't joined you supposed to be in five. Okay. Okay. Oh yeah, hold on. Oh now there's. This is the tricky part about breakout rooms is that people. Okay, I'll put her in room 10. Yeah people will come and go. And it's, it's tricky. She's not joining every 10. No, not joined. Okay, no, I like it. I'll pop. Oh, there she is. Yeah. Okay. There we go. Now everybody should have a room to people per room now. And that was great. You did a really great job on. Thanks. So weird, like not being able to see anymore. So, yeah. So do you want to just share your slides when they come back? Okay. We'll just have that little debrief and then it's like into the journalism part. Okay, I'm going to put up my screen and then so you don't mind helping them debrief. Yeah, I can still call on people because that'll probably be easier if I can see them. Oh yeah, that makes sense. And we started the breakout rooms, what, two, three minutes ago. Yeah, a couple of minutes ago. Okay, so let's see here. So I give them until 12. One until waiting room. It's 25. Somebody just joined. Okay. Hi Jeremy, we're working in breakout rooms on an assignment. Are you just joining us? Yeah, sorry. No worries. I was just trying to get some lunch in while, while, while it was happening, my bad. 20 minutes, if I had gotten 20 minutes earlier, maybe I wouldn't be able to get my lunch in before breaking out on the assignment. You're fine. I just, I didn't want to just like launch you into a breakout room without knowing what we're doing. Okay, so right now they're working on assignment where basically they're half-living like they, they give a message and then they half-life their message basically to kind of sharpen and hone in on their communication skills. But I didn't want to just launch you in there without, you know, a knowledge of what you're doing. So if it's okay, we'll just keep you here and. Okay, that's fine. Yeah. Maybe I'll be able to get a quick bite in real fast. Then take it. Go for it. No worries about that. Absolutely. Go for it. No worries. Right. So, so I'll send a message at 1224, giving them a minute and then we'll close at 1225. I love that exercise though. I saw a lease at an event yesterday. Oh yeah. Yeah. I even share it with students who do an advocacy day. And they practice doing it. Nice. Yeah. She, well, we were talking to Ellen. Yeah. Yeah. And about the public engagement faculty fellowship. And she said you were doing a session on that and that they were going to use this activity for one of their sessions. And then Mara and I will be presenting for that too. Right. Before everyone gets back, I'm sorry if I look, I probably didn't notice I was distracted Lauren. You can see, but I just got an email from my dog walker with a picture of the dead mouse she found on my living room. Oh my gosh. Do you want to go? I just saw a giant possum in my backyard. Like a dog size possum. My old dog once caught in a possum in our backyard in Maryland. And they truly do play dead. It played dead. We got the dog in when, when, when back to take care of it, it was gone. Oh my gosh. Just to let you know, I closed all the breakout rooms and everybody will be joining in 30 seconds. Thank you. I'll wrap up the possum stories. Possibly. All right. Is that everybody back from the breakout rooms? Yes, everyone should be back. All right. Thank you. So, yeah. So how did it go? Does anybody want to share kind of what changed over the course of trying to half life your message? I'll speak. This is my name is Andre from student advocacy center. You can get wordy. So I think we, I don't know if all of us did, but I think all of us had something in mind, but we didn't have the talking points as you, um, you know, said before. And so I think the first time I went, I got a little wordy, um, but as you dwindle down and you need to be succinct and have a clear message, it makes you hone in on exactly the message that you're trying to give. And so I think by the end, um, you know, you kind of wrapped it up and like, Hey, this is what I need. This is what I'm talking about. This is the things you need to know. Um, in that amount of time. So really it was helpful. Great. Thank you. Anybody else want to share? Did you like the message that resulted in the shorter version? I'll go. Um, I'll be very honest with you. I guess I was so wordy, um, I did get the message in the, in the 60 minutes and the 30 seconds. Uh, but the time I got down to the eight second, I. I lost it. I was just, I couldn't. Get to the point. And so, um, something I really have to go and dig into and practice because, um, very honest with you, that's part of what we do at our organization. ask veterans and anyone to practice their elevator speech, we say 30 to 60 seconds. Well, eight seconds is very tough. So we have to understand what is the point that you demonstrated in the beginning. So we really have to give it some thought. What is the point? Thank you. Yeah, it can definitely help you find that elevator pitch, like you said, helps you narrow it down. And I think, you know, there can be value in all the different versions too. I mean, your 60 second version might be more of a guide for, you know, if you have more space to tell this story, like what would you put on a website? What would you put in a press release where you can expand a little bit more? The eight second version might be closer to what would you put in a tweet or a social media post where you have that really limited time and space. So you can use all of all the different versions as guides and how you want to make this point. And yeah, it can be really clarifying. So yeah, I think now we will shift to Mara, and she is going to share more about working with the journalists. Great. Thank you, Lauren. And please, as we go start going through some other content, please jump in with any questions as they come up. Don't feel any need to wait till the end. But now that you have a good sense of the message that you might want to share, we want to talk a little bit through what journalists need to cover your story and to get a good placement for your story. One thing that we often underestimate is just how valuable it is for journalists to have advanced notice, ideally a few weeks. This not only gives them time to like put it in a certain position in their queue of stuff they're already working on, but it also gives them time to do some background reading. Is it showing up okay? I just shared mine. Do you want me to keep doing that or do you want to be able to do it? Let me try to share mine. I didn't realize that it wasn't working, so let me try this again. Sorry about that. Are you seeing it okay now? Yeah. Okay, cool. So you want to give the journalists that you're contacting advanced notice so that they can not only, you know, put it in their queue of stuff that they're working on, but that they can also start to reach out to other people that they might want to incorporate into the story. So whether that is community partners or people on the ground or other points or things that they might want to connect it to, especially if it's a reporter that works in that genre that you want to cover. You also want to make sure that there's a visual element that you're sharing. This can be a video. This can be a photo. This can be a figure, a very clean figure that gets clearly to the point. But if you provide the visual element and not only take some of the work off the journalist plate, but you can also identify how you want this to be visualized for your audience or at least help pitch a visualization for your audience. You want to make sure that when you reach out to journalists, you have multiple sources that they can contact. That might be you. That might be other experts on your team. That might be, again, community partners or community experts, but you want to not only have them accessible, know that they will have time to take calls, but you want to provide the contact information that a journalist can reach out to them with. And it's contact information that the person will, if you don't give them their number, if they're not going to answer a no number, make sure you give them contact information that that person will actually respond to. Finally, you want to make sure that you give them a reason to cover your story. You know why your story is important, but you want to make sure you're pitching this to the reporter in a way that they will immediately understand and know how to present it to their audiences. So what makes your point newsworthy? You can think about it as maybe it's something new. Is it something new, unique, or that just came up? Is it something that people hadn't thought about? We just did something at poverty solutions about how school discipline rates are significantly higher for youth who've experienced homelessness. That's not something people are often thinking about. It's not something at the top of mind. We wanted to get it at the top of a top of mind, especially as a lot of lawmakers are thinking about budgets for next year. We wanted to be more salient in people's minds. But the other thing you can do is you can take an issue that is in the news. Ukraine, COVID, vaccination rates, and provide a different angle or a different lens for readers to understand it with. So something else we had done is been talking about vaccination rates, highlighting that parents are a demographic that has really low vaccination rates. And so that's not something, an angle that had often been discussed in the news and that we wanted to make more salient and how people were interpreting vaccination rates in COVID. You also want to make sure you're reaching out to an outlet and a reporter that covers the topic that you're interested in getting coverage of. So you don't want to reach out to the Wall Street Journal about an art exhibit that you're putting on. You don't want to reach out to, you know, Detroit News about something that's really unique to Nebraska. You want to make sure you're not just contacting good reporters, but you're contacting reporters and outlets that cover the content that you're focused on. A great way to start is just looking at the news that you read or just doing a Google news search for other people who covered something in the genre that you're working on and starting with that and contacting those reporters. So here's some really good examples about pitches when you start sharing your message to reporters. Sometimes what we do is we start with something that really excites us. So we might say, hey, state lawmakers are adopting several of poverty solutions, auto insurance policy recommendations, which was big news for us, but nobody else cares about that. Just because it excites me, nobody else cares about that. A better way to highlight it is that we have experts that can discuss what auto insurance means for low-income residents. And then somewhere down in the story or the pitch, we can say that state lawmakers adopted it. But highlighting that we're special to state lawmakers is not necessarily what reporters are going to be interested in. Another way we could talk about a different story is highlighting there is hotspots for environmental injustice in Michigan that were identified in the U.M. study that's really clearly relevant to the broader public. An alternative, less desirable way to just highlight that we had these recipients named for this new U.M. professorship. Again, something really excited for your mom or your cousin, not that excited for the journalists that are covering the stuff. Okay, so now you know your message, you know the reporters that you want to reach out to, you know why it's relevant. There's a couple of ways that you can reach out to them. You can do a press release, which is basically a draft of a story for the reporter. You know, like 300 to 500 words with the visuals that starts off with the basically an idea for a headline that they can use. So you're basically saying this is the new story that you can be pitching. Another way that you can do it is you can say immediate advisory. Hey, we have this event going on and you really go through the who, the what, the where, and the when of it. Often it takes that exact format. You're saying we have this event going on. Here's who's going to be there. This is what it's about. Here's when and where. Here's where you can park all the details and the logistics so that reporters can easily get there. Maybe you're not trying to do this broad press release. Maybe you're not trying to reach like 50 reporters and you don't want all that, but you have a couple of reporters that you can just reach out to personally and say and give them your pitch directly. And you can do that in email or you can do that in a conversation. So when you're pitching the story, there's a couple steps that you might go through. You contact them often through email now. It might be a DM. It might be personally, but whatever you do, you put the press release in the body of the email and attachment. It's just something else. It's just another step that reporters have to go through. So if you can remove that step, then you facilitate them accessing your story. You're going to explain why your project is newsworthy and to them and to the general public, and you're going to lead with that in a really concise succinct way. You're going to include all of the contact information for sources that they could follow up with to get other quotes, other ideas, other perceptions or perspectives on the issue, including their availability for interviews, and again, the contact information that they will respond to. And then you're going to include links to other relevant information if that's bigger reports or other articles that they've covered that touch on this topic, just connect it to other things that might make it more salient and relevant to them. Here's a couple ways that you might reach out to reporters. So a really good way is, especially if you don't know them, is to say, hey, I saw that you covered this based on your coverage of destroyed schools. I thought you might be interested in a new data book on the educational implications of homelessness. You can elaborate on that and then say, if you'd like to learn more, I can connect you with the spokesperson at this time who's available at these times. So here you're connecting it to what the reporter is interested in and what the reporter typically covers. So you're saying why this is relevant to them or why they might be particularly interested in it. And you're saying what's new, what's the value added of this work that you're sharing? Some things that you want to avoid doing is that you want to avoid reaching out to reporters and then you or other people not being available for comment. That is a really quick way to burn bridges because you just wasted some of their time. You grab their attention and then you weren't available for the follow-up. Asking for help promoting fundraisers or just asking for stuff as the kindness of their heart isn't something that anybody, you or reporters have a ton of time to do. You really want to make sure you give people more of a heads up. This is not uncommon where people will reach out to reporters and be like, hey, this is about to happen right now, especially if you're not the governor or a senator. This will really not work and it won't get you any brownie points with them. And finally, you just want to make sure you're using the right names. You're using the right formalities when you reach out to people that it doesn't look like some generic message that you copy and paste it to a bunch of different reporters. So a common mistake is using gendering people the wrong way or using some typos in the name. And then just remember, even if you don't hear from them after that first pitch, you're building rapport over time. This isn't your only event. This isn't your only project. This isn't your only article so that you can reach out to them down the road. They may have had a busy week. They may have been off that week. So reach out to them again and just keep on working on that report, especially if it's a reporter you really respect. A couple tips to keep in mind when you do get called back by reporters. One, just knowing the difference between these three things. You should assume that when you are talking to a reporter, anything you say is on the record and can be used in a quote. If you don't want it to be used in a quote, then you should say, if it can be used in a story, then you would say it's on background. That means this can be used in your story, but don't quote me for it. If you don't want it to be used at all and you don't want to be quoted for, then it's off the record. So that might be something if I'm saying, if I know the reporter is going to keep following up, I used to work in a governor's office. So if I know they're going to keep pursuing this person and I'm going to be like, listen, off the record, the governor is really sick. The governor is going through this really crazy personal thing. I don't want it on the record. I don't want them writing it, but I do want them to have some, I want them to stop pursuing it, and I want to give them a reason. They're humans too. They understand that stuff comes up, but if you're just being evasive, then they're going to think that something suspicious is going on. So these can be really useful tools and just communicating with reporters and being clear about what you want reported and what you don't want reported. If they ask you something that you don't know, it's 100% fine, and it's like exponentially better to just say you don't know. The last thing you want is to be quoted for something that's inaccurate, that will detract from your credibility. So it's okay to say I'm not sure, but I can get back to you, reporters, respect and appreciate that. Sometimes, like we had said, like you just pointed out in the last exercise that you went through, you're sharing a lot of information. So to the degree that you can highlight your key takeaways, you want to do that. You want to keep coming back to it. These are my three big points. These are the three trends we're seeing. The key takeaway is anything that you can do to make it clear what you want them to be paying attention to will really help them write the story and frame it in a way that is consistent with what you're imagining. Just like when you, if you're a researcher, just like when you submit articles, you always want to be prepared to address the counterpoint. And it's the same thing that when you're submitting something to a journal, they want to know what critics are going to say. So if you can address it for them, then it will reduce the likelihood that they'll go to someone who's going to completely contradict you and again make it look detract from your credibility or make it look like you hadn't considered something. You want to say, other people might say this, and here's what I would say. And here's something to consider. But you want to make sure you're clearly coming across with all the information that may be relevant. Try to avoid using no comment. If you're going to decline a comment, then you generally want to offer a reason. Again, if you do this, they're just one going to not come back to you. It's going to really detract from your relationship. They're not spending time talking to you because they want you to say no comment. And then often it can make it look like you're hiding something. So I would try not to do that as much as you can. And generally, I wouldn't ask to, you can ask to review the piece before it's published, but I wouldn't expect it because reporters, just like you are often on tight timelines, you can't take that time to go for a back and forth process. They have to go through many layers of their own editors. So it's generally not possible to get your sign off before they publish a piece. So just try to be really clear up front. And then finally, rejects flawed premise of a question and you can reorient the conversation. So sometimes you start seeing a reporter go in a direction that you're like, this is not how I want you to be thinking about this issue. So there's a couple examples of ways that you can help reorient them without saying that explicitly. So one thing you can do is you could say if they're starting to group what you're talking about with other issues that you think it's distinct from, you can say that that's a really big question. What I'm really trying to focus on and what I'm really trying to drive home is this specific part of it. Or this is really what I feel comfortable talking about. But you can say something like that to reorient the conversation to the specific thing that you feel comfortable elaborating on. If you feel like they're getting too bogged down in the details and you want to make sure they think about the issue as part of a broader trend or a broader story, then say that, then tell them if we step back, if we look at the bigger picture, then this is consistent with these larger patterns or help them make that connection. You can also try to add context in a temporal way by saying if we compare it to where we were a year ago, but you can add the reference point that you want them to be drawing upon when they're contextualizing your story. And again, you can flag it. If there's a key point that you want to drive home, then don't hesitate to go back to that by saying the key point that I want to drive home, the real issue here, there's a bunch of different ways that we can frame that, but don't hesitate to reorient the conversation. I think I love one of my favorite shows is Meet the Press because then you, those are the people who are experts at it, just seeing how they can shift where the conversation is going and they have all these segues, truly an art. And don't hesitate to just reiterate. Don't hesitate to come back to your point and say it again. You don't want to be on the record of saying something you're not comfortable with or connecting or with the point you're making being connected to something, so don't hesitate to go back to what you are comfortable with. You have to drive your own conversation. After the story comes out, it's great. Make sure that you help promote it, too. That will also build your rapport with a reporter and that it's not naturally going to get into everyone's inbox, so you want to help do some of that work, so make sure you share it on social media, that you share it with people in your network, you email it, you put it in newsletters, whatever works for the forum or organization that you're working at. Don't forget to thank the reporter, highlight anything that you liked about the story. Thank them for their attention or anything of that nature, but remember it's about building the relationship with a reporter. If there are things that are incorrect, then don't hesitate to reach out to them with very specific information about why it is incorrect and often you can say, you know, I'm concerned about this because of X because I don't want it to be. We have a lot of data on unemployment trends which can get really deep into the weeds and so sometimes we've had to ask for corrections on those points to say, you know, we really want to be clear about that this is people in the labor market and not just everybody's employment rate and so usually they're receptive to that, but it's not uncommon to ask for it, so don't hesitate to do it if you feel like something's not represented correctly. So these are our main points, but we're going to share these slides with you, but we also want to encourage you to reach out, especially if you're at Ford to the resources that are at Ford, so especially Daniel Rivkin has been a great resource at helping people connect with reporters, frame their stories, prepare different types of communications content, support you in writing off ads and doing various walkthroughs, so he's here and he's accessible, so I think that information will be shared in a follow-up email if I don't hesitate to reach out to him if you need additional assistance. So thank you guys for being here and for walking through all this with us. We'd love to hear your questions or more specific comments about where you guys are, what would be helpful to you? Laura, we did have a question in the chat from Teresa, how do you make daily services to clients newsworthy or don't we, do we just have to wait for some larger story to make our work interesting and in those cases reporters tend to reach out to us anyways, Teresa says, so yeah I don't know if you have any thoughts on just how to make kind of your day-to-day services seem more unique, timely, relevant and newsworthy. What are the types of services you provide? Can you hear me? I'm not sure if I can put myself okay great, so I'm the fund development and engagement manager here at 3DHOP Detroit, we are a shelter for asylum seekers, we provide legal aid, coordination of healthcare, connection to resources, shelter for up to two years, yeah I mean that's it and that's regarding like just primary employment, medical, mental healthcare, legal aid, shelter and basic needs and living, I'm sorry, housing resources. Huge news, as you said, the previous asylum seekers that we helped, if we do a career charge, it's not really newsworthy because we do it on a day-to-day basis, it's not. The sexiest thing where we find we get abused is sadly when something like FNFM happens or Haiti or the situation at the border, then reporters tend to call and often they conflate our work with some other work, so that's a huge opportunity for us that we do our best to leverage in terms of making it also educational and explaining the work we do and putting eyes on us for that temporary period. It will say with limited capacity, you know, we're not in the position to do a lot of media cultivation right now, but luckily we've been around for almost 40 years and so predecessors have done that and they keep in touch when those hot button areas, hot button issues sort of happen. But yeah, that's the question is can we just, I don't know, make what we're doing interesting and I haven't found that to be the case. Yeah, that's a really great point. There's a couple things and it's, I think, as you're saying, it's so challenging because I know you guys have limited resources to spend on cultivating these relationships. I think there's a couple patterns that can be, that can be useful. I have to say it's always, this is a population going through a lot, so then there's all these other dynamics that need to be considered. The things that contribute to reporters covering services like this, everyone, every reporter always likes the personal stories. So personal narratives are often what they want to go for. Often you can use that anonymously in connection with some larger data or some larger needs. So to the extent that that's possible, if there is a larger event than connecting it to that, if not, it sounds like what you're saying is you don't always want it to be in response to some big news event or crisis, which makes sense. I think to the extent that you can find data that's publicly available or find someone to do some of the analyses for you, often connecting it to that will help one provide the personal narrative that reporters like, but also connect it to larger trends. I think there's a whole other conversation we could do about issues like this where they're super racialized and then there's some people who will read it and then they like, we're not supportive of refugees and then there's this backlash effect. And so thinking about how you want to frame stuff that often can polarize audiences can be something that that's really sensitive. You have to be really strategic about and I'd be happy to talk to get my thoughts on that more in another conversation. Lauren, do you have any other thoughts? Well, I think that's great. Yeah, I think you covered it. Andre. Yes, I have a question. So in your email or your communication, your initial, how much information do you give them all the information you want in the email or in the first communication, or do you save some for, you know, the personal one-on-one conversation? We usually like, so when we send out a press release, we'll work with Michigan News. And yeah, if you're outside the university, you wouldn't have exactly the same setup. But we will go ahead and email the whole press release in the body of the email. So it's easier for them to just skim the information. And then I might attach like a personal note just at the top of that thing. Here's why I thought you would be interested in this, to just make that connection and make it relevant for their audience specifically and say, you know, here's the press release below my signature. I'm happy to connect you with whoever our spokesperson is if you want to learn more. So you don't need to share, you know, everything that you know, or, you know, all of the information. I think that's where you go back to like your key messages and what are, what's the main point that you want to get across and just, yeah, go ahead and send all of that in your initial pitch. I think that's fine. And then if they're interested in more detail in certain aspects of a report, a project, you know, whatever it is, then you can go out and provide more as the conversation unfolds. Anything else, Mara? Okay, that's perfect. I have a quick question. Kelly, go ahead. So do you ever do both like a media alert and a press release when it comes like an event? Let's say weeks before send a media alert with the who what where when why just kind of give them a heads up. And then maybe a week or what would be your suggested timeline in terms of then sending a press release closer to the event? Would you say like a week out? Or what would you suggest in terms of a timeline for both of those documents? I think it depends on your goal for the event. If it's really important to get people to the event or to like come to the press conference to learn the news, then we wouldn't send out a press release in advance. So then you would want to stick with just kind of that shorter like media advisory event announcement. And yeah, I think like Mara said, maybe a week or two maximum in advance, and then totally fine to follow up with like a day before day of reminder, like, hey, just wanted to bring this to the top of your inbox, just wanted to send a reminder, see if you're planning to be here. But if it's really important to share the news at the event, then I would not recommend a press release. If it's more just, you know, you're trying to build general awareness. And if they can come to the event to that, you know, that that's just a bonus, then yeah, having a press release go out leading up to an event, you know, could work as well. Okay, because like I was thinking like if we had some type of like, like a walk or a run or something like that, I didn't know how far out they you know, if we're trying to get them to attend an event. That's why I guess I should have been more specific, like, would you suggest sending out a media alert, you know, like maybe weeks before even like four weeks out and then send a more, maybe a little bit more concrete, a little bit more detail oriented press release closer to the event. Yeah, I think that could work. I don't know that you would need to do four weeks, just because things change quickly, you know, in the news landscape. And so if you're doing that far advance notice that could get lost in the shuffle, maybe a couple weeks and then reminders, or press release, yeah, getting closer to it. Okay. That sounds right. Yeah. Sure. Thanks. Okay. Go ahead. No, did you have more to add on that one? No, I was just going to point to a question from Chelsea. And Chelsea was asking, was saying that she works in the public sector and would also often have media reach out about different projects or issues in the community that they were working on, but not ready or able to talk about yet. So their timeline for comment, the reporter's timeline for comment was very short before they were publishing. So you have any suggestions for navigating the media when you don't have a communication plan together? Lauren, do you want to take a first response to that? Sure. I think if you can promise a fairly definitive timeline for when you can share the information, no reporters might be willing to hold a story or to do a follow-up story to incorporate that information. Otherwise, I mean, I think sometimes we've just said, oh, we're not able to respond to this request right now. It's just not worth it to try to put, to share something that's half-baked, basically. And so it can be better to just follow up when you are more prepared to do a fuller rollout. Anything else, Mara? No, I think that summarizes it really well. I mean, I think reporters also know if they're asking for comment with really short notice, they often are reaching out to multiple people and they understand that you may not be able to do it. Any other thoughts or questions? Do you see Catherine's question about Twitter and the value? That's a great question. Yeah. I'm sorry. Do you want me to? It's the question about Twitter and the value of using it to build brand awareness. Is a constant presence, sharing activity, good idea, any thoughts? Lauren, do you want to take that? Do you have strong reactions to this? I mean, I think that I think social media in general is super helpful for building brand awareness. And generally, the more consistently you can be posting the better, you know, it can help to not only share your own content, but to be interacting with other people who are in, you know, the same sector, same space that you want to be networking with. And it's really a way to just, you know, build your following of people who already have expressed some level of interest in your work. And so then you're, you know, continually just sharing with them. So yeah, I mean, I think there is a lot of value in doing that. I do think the consistency is a big piece of it. And so if you don't have, you know, the staff time or resources to dedicate to it, you know, maybe start with one platform that you're trying to be consistently posting on versus trying to be on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, across the board and not really doing any of it well or strategically. That would be my kind of initial reaction to that. Yeah, I would agree with all those points. I really want to highlight, I think a lot of people go on Twitter, any of these and really just put out their own content and then every now and then like some others content. But if you really want to be effective and build the audience, it's really great if you can do exactly what Lauren does. And that's kind of respond to or comment on other people's posts that are in your field that you want to engage with. Because then it's more of a conversation and a more meaningful engagement with others. And I retweet a lot of journalists too. I think that's just a good way to like be on their radar and just kind of have that extra point of contact. Super helpful. Thank you so much. Any other questions? I want to say just the last questions, what it says to me is we need another workshop on using social media. Yes, I love that. Right? Yes. We did one those years ago, so let's do another one. Oh wait, we got Bruce. Oh yeah, Bryce had submitted this out of time. How is social media impacted the relationship between policymakers slash analysts and communications experts? How can these forms serve as an effective intermediary between policy experts and citizens? I mean, I think social media just increases the access that all of these people have to each other. So we aren't as dependent on reporters to kind of be the gatekeepers and decide which stories get a bigger platform. I think it's easier for the average person to reach out directly to policymakers and for policymakers to be engaging in that online discussion too. Any other thoughts on that, Mara? Just how you've seen those relationships change? I think what we know is that the other angle is that social media tends to have more extreme views, and so it tends to really polarize political debates in ways that isn't always constructive. And so that's a problematic element of how social media is engaging and affecting public opinion. But it's also something that some people are trying to make a more conscientious effort of countering and having more productive and less like critical communications. But it is something that's been shown to just amplify existing patterns of polarization. We're at time now, and I just want to thank you both, Lauren and Mara, for this and for everybody who attended. We'll send out a follow-up email with the links and the contacts, and thank you all for attending and look for news for maybe part two. But thank you all, and everybody have a great rest of your day.