| What do the following scenarios have in common?
- Helping a travel industry website give $1 million to charity
- Celebrating a new holiday product combining Christmas and Hanukkah
- Responding to a variety of publics after a major art museum heist
- How to promote Oscar Night while helping families affected by breast cancer
Public relations professionals heard answers to these questions during a summer meeting of PRSA Boston’s Independent Practitioners Network (IPN) at the Weston Public Library. The group heard four senior practitioners discuss Best Practices on PR Campaigns, involving corporate social responsibility, crisis communications and media relations - the latter through both traditional and social media vehicles. Leverage – of media outlets, communications vehicles, and reporters’ beats – was a common theme in reaching diverse audiences and helping charitable organizations, under very tight time constraints. Barry Wanger, APR, Fellow PRSA (Wanger Associates) hosted the forum, featuring presentations by Diane Pardes (Pardes Communications, Inc.); Edna Kaplan (KOGS Communication LLC); Julie Dennehy, APR (Dennehy Public Relations) and Wanger.
Voting Has Its Rewards
Diane Pardes led off the forum, talking about the fall 2008 campaign which paralleled (and leveraged) that year’s presidential election for TripAdvisor. The latter is a travel-related Website and community, which encourages visitors to provide feedback on travel experiences, rate hotels and other user-generated content. Trip Advisor was promoting its “More Than Footprints” campaign to donate $1 million – via popular vote by site visitors – among five charities: Doctors Without Borders; Save the Children; The Nature Conservancy; Conservation International and the National Geographic Society. The campaign’s timing was less than perfect, due to factors beyond the company’s control. “We started in October,” Pardes recalled. “All the marketing materials were already in motion and had to go out the day after the Stock Market crashed.”
TripAdvisor and Pardes Communications utilized several strategies and tactics. The campaign received national attention via three blonde female triplets in an outdoor crowd shot on NBC’s Today Show. Co-host Al Roker interviewed them, with each wearing a T shirt saying “Vote” and explaining the campaign. The outreach also utilized a “Get Out the Vote” video produced by TripAdvisor, featuring actress Rosario Dawson (“Zookeeper”, “Wonder Woman”). Playing off a similar video, starring fellow actors for that fall’s presidential campaign, this tongue-in-cheek production had Dawson initially urging people not to vote; only to change her mind and then communicate the importance of voting in the “More Than Footprints” election. TripAdvisor and Pardes hit on important placements in travel, entertainment, philanthropy and radio media outlets. These included an Associated Press article that she said “went everywhere.”
Ultimately, everyone would be a winner in this election. TripAdvisor had more than a million voter “hits” and each nominee received funds, apportioned as a percentage of Website votes. Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children were the big winners, with 39.2 % of the vote ($392,000) and 34.7 % ($347,000) respectively. Each of the others received at least $54,000.
We Wish You the Merriest…the Happiest….
Edna Kaplan discussed her recollections of “Chrismukkah,” describing it as “the most fun I’ve ever had on a campaign.” In the tradition of Seinfeld’s “Festivus – a holiday for all of us,” and taken from a mention on the television show, “The OC,” this “holiday” marks a comingled celebration of Christmas and Hanukkah. Kaplan said she was approached in the fall of 2004 by Ron Gompertz, a Montana resident and partner in a Christian-Jewish marriage, who wanted to celebrate both December holidays via his new line of greeting cards. She signed a contract on November 5 and immediately set about on a campaign. “We poured over demographics and found that most intermarriage occurs on both coasts,” said Kaplan. The initial strategy involved advertising in ethnic media outlets, but several Jewish publications refused to take part. This led to a search for testimony from a satisfied retail customer, with Kaplan noting that one was identified in, of all places, Kansas City.
With time running short before the Holiday Season, a media placement by the day after Thanksgiving was a priority. An early present, an Associated Press article, led to additional coverage on the “Today Show” and ABC’s “Good Morning America.” She observed, “We do so much social media today. But we still need (to reach) traditional media outlets.” In 2004, the traditional media would be the most valued vehicle for publicity about Chrismukkah cards. That fall and winter, there were more than 2,000 media “hits” for a campaign whose goal was “30 or 40.” They included articles in USA Today and the Wall Street Journal – and newspapers in the U.K., Russia and even Jerusalem. In addition, Fox Network News asked how an interfaith couple would decorate a Holiday tree and went on to spend two days filming such a couple.
Kaplan noted the investment of “long days and nights” in this six-week campaign, but the results were more than worthwhile, with sales of Chrismukkah cards topping 12 times the goal. The campaign also won Kaplan and KOGS Communication a PRSA Silver Anvil Award and a New England Bell Ringer Award from the Publicity Club of Boston.
Okay, Paint Me a Picture
Early on a Sunday morning in January 1990, thieves masquerading as police officers surprised security guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. They made off with a number of paintings – each with the canvas cut right out of their frames – from the museum in Boston’s Fens area. Soon after, Barry Wanger got a call from Anne Hawley, the museum’s executive director, asking for some crisis communications help. He was greeted by 75 phone messages from reporters around the world and the need to develop a plan, gather the facts quickly and relay them to inquisitive and impatient media representatives.
Wanger met with Hawley and the museum’s curator – the person most knowledgeable about the paintings – and with a representative of the FBI. “There was a crowd of reporters waiting outside,” he noted, adding “We had a crime scene at the museum. We could not let them inside.” After ascertaining the facts Wanger, recommended they hold a news conference at 12 Noon in the courtyard. After the initial press conference, he executed a hastily devised strategy involving:
- Preparation of press packages containing photos of the missing paintings.
- Identification of key audiences for the museum, including Board members; major donors and other friends of the museum.
- Outreach to additional media members from major local and national outlets.
Wanger had museum officials reach friends and constituents while he set about arranging the distribution of follow-up information. “Three days later,” he recalled. “We opened up the museum but closed off the room where the paintings had been stolen.” In front of this room, “We stationed an older, distinguished-looking security guard,” whose image contrasted with the typical, much younger security personnel. As the crisis subsided, the museum held follow-up interviews with several media outlets, including Good Morning America, Newsweek, the New York Times and Boston Globe. These were instrumental in gathering positive coverage that cast the museum in a sympathetic light. With the help of the FBI, museum officials estimated the loss value at about $300 million. They stressed that the paintings themselves were not covered by insurance; and the Last Will of founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner, stipulated that the (stolen) paintings could never be replaced by other artwork. Two weeks of 12-hour days later, Wanger was finished and had a new found reputation as an expert in crisis communications.
Oscar and Ellie
The theme of “Doing well by doing good,” has been increasingly embraced by business. Julie Dennehy used this approach during the 2011 Academy Awards season to provide PR and social media support to Oscar Night Boston, a WCVB TV 5 telecast and gala benefitting the Ellie Fund, a local nonprofit fighting breast cancer and supporting over 500 local families. For the past five years, she has worked with the Ellie Fund to raise much needed funds for services, including transportation for treatment, shopping, meals and childcare. The organization’s fundraising events attract a fan base of young professionals, breast cancer survivors and benefactors whose lives have been touched by the disease. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Pictures provided charities in 20 cities (one per state) with an opportunity to piggyback onto Oscar Night festivities. The Ellie Fund benefits from a strong partnership with ABC and locally on WCVB, which telecasts the Oscars live. “The Oscars and the Ellie Fund are great brands, and I’m pleased to help support them and build a strong relationship through partnerships like with WCVB,” Dennehy said.
Dennehy was charged with coordinating all local VIPs and media coverage for the event, airing live from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Boston on February 27. Since actor-producer Mark Wahlberg (a Dorchester native) and his locally-based film, “The Fighter” was nominated for several Oscars, Dennehy used a variety of strategies to promote Oscar Night Boston and create local ties to “The Fighter” and other nominated Boston films. On January 27, the morning the nominations were announced, she came up with the idea of having a breakfast at the Mandarin Hotel to watch the nomination announcements with WCVB personalities, Ellie Fund officials and actors; including Melissa Meekin and Erica McDermott (a.k.a. “The Fighter Sisters,”) who played two of Ward’s siblings in the film,” and F. Murray Abraham, a 1984 Oscar winner (Amadeus) who was in Boston performing a play at the Emerson Theatre.
The strategy garnered media coverage just a few weeks before the big event, leading to an early sell-out of tickets. Other early strategies included promotion of both the Ellie Fund’s on-line auction of movie memorabilia, and local businesses that were Oscar Night sponsors –, as well as a very active Facebook page and Twitter feed. On Oscar night, Dennehy deployed a “Tweet Team” to promote on-line bidding and enhance viewer participation (250 tweets that night), as well as increase website traffic to www.elliefund.org among those who could not attend. When the night was over, “The Fighter” won two Oscars, the Ellie Fund was $250,000 richer (an increase of 10% over 2010), and there was much post-event buzz via social media channels.
Wisdom to Go: Lessons Learned and Take-Home Points
The speakers agreed on – and at times echoed – several points. They included the following:
- Look for several angles to tell your story. Do not pitch the business press the way you would the consumer press. The same is true for the entertainment press. Be persistent.
- Work around editors’ timelines as much as possible.
- Be creative, think out of the box, leverage other marketing activities.
- We still need the traditional media outlets. You still need to pitch them.
- Step away from what you specialize in. Most of us can do almost anything.
- Editors are always looking for light, humorous stories.
- Take the time you need to better plan a news conference. Ours would have worked better at 2 PM than at noon.
- People always want to hear from the CEO first.
- You need to see where partnerships with other organizations are possible, and what gaps you can fill.
- Good tweeters must be good writers, be marketing and tech savvy – and funny.
—Michael Morgan, Morgan & Associates |
It didn't hurt that our 
