How to write news releases for nonprofit agencies

Here's how to write a news release for any given nonprofit agency looking for help from an independent media consultant or journalist (free-lance news release writer). To begin, look foremost for excellent resources--credible and current. Send a media release to the editor. Content would run a page and a half.

Choose topics related most closely to the current projects or themes of the particular month. The newsletter may have guidelines as to what topics are chosen each month. Also check out this author's paperback book, The Writer's Bible: Digital and Print Media: Skills, Promotion, and Marketing for Novelists, Playwrights, and Script Writers. Writing Entertainment Content for the New and Print Media. (656 pages).

Follow that calendar when you choose what topics to cover in the content you send to the newsletter with your press release. Work your book into the press release by covering the topic of the month for that newsletter. For example, if the newsletter of the nonprofit agency is circulated to persons with mobility-related disabilities, and your book is about travel, emphasize what new technology is provided.

The idea is to deliver the message about how to make travel accessible, available, and affordable to those with mobility-related disabilities, such as rough terrain wheel chairs, accessibility to transportation, or tours and hotel rooms equipped for use by persons with mobility-related disabilities. Emphasize tours for those who walk slow, use walkers or wheelchairs or related topics. Use the same theme to write for mainstream magazines. Most information from your press releases can turn into query letters destined for mainstream magazines. The press release may be about one to one and a half pages in word length.



How to Begin

When you’re writing an article for a nonprofit’s newsletter, the content would be different than when merely sending a press release about your book. An article has more of a chance to be published than a press release. Customize the article to run about a page and a half, which is the same size in length as a media release. Here’s where the difference kicks in. Your short article has a title that gives specific information. One example would be Ten Tips on Avoiding Elderly Abuse.

When this author wrote a paperback book on the topic of preventing elderly abuse, a section in the book mentioning 60 points to become aware of related to preventing elderly abuse easily could be condensed into ten tips on avoiding elderly abuse that would fit the tight space requirements of a brief nonprofit newsletter. The 515-page paperback book is titled, How To Stop Elderly Abuse: A Prevention Guidebook.

It is important to include a tagline in the article before sending your content to a nonprofit association’s newsletter editor. The tagline should include information on your book and two sentences showing your expertise. Offer tips, and inform the editors that they can publish your tips on how to do something that’s in your book—as long as they include the entire tagline mentioning your book.

Nonprofit newsletter editors prefer articles giving 10 tips on how to do or prevent something important that they are emphasizing that month in their newsletter. It works most of the time also with magazine editors.

Not all nonprofit agencies publish only one type of publication. In addition to a newsletter, there may be glossy magazines, employee newsletters (called house organs), and other publications. The glossy magazines published quarterly or even monthly by some of these nonprofits usually pay for content. Additionally, some newsletters also pay for press releases, unlike newspapers. After your articles are published, ask if you can become their regular columnist if you’re looking for freelance writing that helps your book publicity as well.

Prepare a dozen columns to fit the length of the glossy magazine published by some nonprofits and send it out to the editors. Do the same for the newsletters, restricting the length to what’s usually published in those brief newsletters. Send a cover letter with the columns and tagline about your book at the end of each article, media release, column, or other content material you send. Never send anything too long for the publication. Count the words in the newsletter’s monthly columns, articles, or press releases.

Connect To People and Communicate with Clarity

What can you expect when you try to connect to people with empathy in mind? Give useful, current, or hidden facts that help people make more informed choices. Ask how you can serve your audience by solving problems and getting results through your research and writing in future books, interviews, or articles.

Focus on how you can help other authors or publishers sell more books by visiting schools to talk about writing, age-appropriate topics, current events, history, health, or storytelling. It’s the empathy and social smarts that makes you charismatic as a writer and speaker who does research that easily can be fact-checked by readers. The thoroughness of your research earns you credibility points. And credibility is publicity.

Emphasize positive points. Charisma is about connecting to people in a positive atmosphere.

The more that you understand what people want from a book or article about your specific topic, the better you can connect. Do feasibility studies and market research before you decide what kind of book, article, or media release to make public.

Talk to editors and publishers at national associations’ meetings or conferences. Ask why editors choose to publish or reject similar, equally qualified books on specific trendy subjects in a particular year.

Ask publishers what book and/or article topics are ‘in’ or ‘out’ this season and why. Examples include memoirs books, angel books, or ethnic books being in or out of fashion for a specific season.

Are their choices based on sales potential? Who does their feasibility and market research and what questions are asked to predict future sales?

Write an article about how they arrive at their predictions. What sources and trends do they research?

Show how their conclusions are based on improving sales figures of books pointing to products with high sales and popular culture trends or high-demand needs and requests. What types of marketing surveys are used?

Offer the article to writing-related publications. Connect new writers with trade journals related to the business end of publishing.

Empathy is about walking in the other person’s shoes. Practice social smarts by connecting people in one business to people in another business for current, practical, and transferable reasons.

Physicians and physicists may not have the time to communicate enough, but both could be interested in your new book researching what 25 diverse, credible scientists say about why spontaneous healing occurs.

Empathy is about walking in the other person’s shoes. Practice social smarts by connecting people in one business to people in another business for current, practical, and transferable reasons.

What If You Want to Write Books as Well as News Releases?

Physicians and physicists may not have the time to communicate enough, but both could be interested in your new book researching what 25 diverse, credible scientists say about why spontaneous healing occurs.

To sell books, develop relationships. You have to make people want to buy your books by inspiring and motivating them with concrete facts, details, and new trends or resources.

Your books must inspire commitment in readers. The only thing that will sell in books is to inspire people to be more committed to what they do or what they enjoy. To sell your books, sell commitment and simplicity.

People want facts and instruction that are easy to understand and at the same time makes them want to be more committed to what they enjoy doing either in their work or in their relationships or in fixing, decorating, and cleaning up their homes, meals, or environments. The same formula applies to making workplaces better through commitment and making the complex easier to understand—making life simpler.

That’s how you sell your book—even if your book is about how to build dog houses. To sell your book, develop vision. Become a visionary at selling your book using social radar. As a writer, it’s better to have social smarts. Tell readers where to get expert information in depth on the subjects you cover.

Writers seeking free book publicity need to start by developing better relationships with the people who can buy and sell their books. Include the associations that move those books. Develop relationships with some of the small publishers’ associations and nonprofit agencies emphasizing the subject matter in your books. Review the books of other authors. Ask authors to include a comment or quote from your book in their books and not only in their bibliographies.

Free book publicity is upward mobility. It’s like a promotion, and it only comes about when you develop a strong relationship with editors and publishers of topic-related newsletters and magazines, including online audio and video content.

To get free publicity, you need to develop working relationships even though you may be a freelancer/independent contractor. Teach online. Start columns for print distribution. If your article or column appears in print, you can get permission to put it online if you ask for your copyright or publishing rights. But if your article or column first appears online at your Web site, it could be rejected by print publications as having appeared as distributed content. Then its status is reprint only, and you might not get paid.

Skills and high IQ in writers often lose out to high social smarts, which consists of the working relationships you have with editors and publishers and also with your audience of readers, which includes school librarians, coordinators, and teachers who order the books 45 at a time for students when you speak at school assemblies.

What is the best move a writer can make to sell a book and get free publicity? Get the tools of your trade. Imitate a great politician. Build relationships with those who buy or promote your books. Street smarts or social intelligence is one tool among many.

If you are unable to travel or speak in public, you have many other tools available that include the written word disseminated to audiences interested in your specific topics and corporate, family, newcomer, travel, or institutional gift baskets. If you’re selling a book on fad diets and gum disease, you might wish to inform manufacturers of health food products or holistic dental aids to package your book with orders of certain products.

To earn free book publicity, you can’t stand still. You have to move your book forward just as you did in its plot. And you move the plot forward by actions of the characters. In the same way, you move the sales of your book forward by the actions of people with the power to promote or buy your work.

How you accomplish moving your work forward is to measure the range of change in attitudes toward your book by those you contact. If you are empathetic enough towards your readers, you’ll come up with a book that answers their questions, fulfills their needs, solves problems, and offers results. Before you write a book, ask potential readers what they want to see in a book and what information and resources the topic should include.

People know what they want if you ask them. They want instructions on how to solve specific problems, step-by-step guides to follow, and results to measure. Put empathy first before you write your book and before you write your articles, columns, or press releases about your work.

Put yourself in the reader’s shoes before you write anything. People want empathy, commitment, and simplicity in a book that solves problems and gets measurable results. People want information they can check, use, and apply to make better choices. All these answers need to appear in your book publicity, your book, and any columns you write for nonprofits or when you present or show a video while visiting schools, clubs, community centers, senior centers, children’s camps, parent organizations, houses of worship, creative writing boot camps, libraries and bookstores.

Understand and be empathetic with your readers and editors. You can learn to understand them by walking a mile in their roles. Look at the world from their eyes before you write the first query letter.

What do they want most in their busy day? Some editors often are so busy that they tell writers not to write to them more than once a year because it clogs their email box. They get this way from hundreds of writers emailing in stories each week. Your job is to find out how to make yourself more than a total stranger without clogging their email box. Your best bet might be a press conference where you invite the editors to brunch. You can do this by teleconferencing as well as in person.

When an editor is not busy, you can talk. This is accomplished at clubs where the editor sits at the same table as writers as in professional associations conferences and meetings. Social radar in the world of publishing is about targeting those with the power to publish, promote, or sell your book.

There are various levels of social smarts, also called emotional intelligence, social radar, or social intelligence. As a journalist or writer, you are good at observing people. Then observe how others treat one another at meetings and when competing at work. Why do writers act the way they do with one another?

Why do editors and publishers treat staff and freelance writers differently, or treat writers in general in the ways that they do? Observe how editors and publishers treat writers and switch roles with an editor for three months—either for real as in a game show or in your imagination. Write down what the editor sees each day from writers, including you.

You can make a documentary video about switching roles—writer and editor or publisher. Keep track of the information that comes in and write about it. Use it in your book promotion. Process the information. Build your relationship with the editor you switched roles with for a short time.

Writers make their livings explaining the complex to people looking for simple or at least easier-to-understand and follow answers. To communicate means to share meaning. It's about making a commitment to empathy, observing, and sharing. What do you have to do in order for others to value your information as credible, validated, reliable, factual evidence or well-designed art? As a writer you have to work with people, and commitment is the beginning.

To develop your social skills in writing so that those smarter than you and those not as informed will value your information, begin to promote your book by writing columns that help people observe others, solve problems, and get measurable results. Check to see how simple you have made your information so others can follow your writing step-by-step without confusion. Write to share meaning.

Begin by writing a news release or column made up of brief excerpts your potential book or documentary project. Send out the excerpts to a variety of publications. Inform the editor that the article may be run free in free in exchange for a credit mentioning the book. Anything you offer free in exchange for mention of your book in a national publication is excellent exposure and free publicity for your projects.