Re: [RCSE] Re: PR for clubs
It really depends on your goals. Our club was in the local newspapers many times. Color printed fliers are at many stores and shops. Got a couple visitors, but that's about it. We were in front of City Council a good number of times. Most local soaring guys decided they did not want a club, or contests and did not even want an official field. They are happy flying at a non-AMA insured field and doing just fine. Woodies and electrics have taken over much of soaring because they are fun. Clubs are work, and true competitive soaring is a craft that the electric parkfliers are not that interested in. Competition is a lot of very hard work and paperwork for usually only one or two individuals. Is the PR to promote soaring in general or specifically the ESL? PR should strive to have some measurable results and the right audience to be considered effective. Is it directed at existing power and electric fliers, existing soaring persons, general public, school kids, soccer moms, etc? There is no one type of campaign that covers them all. The content of something going to a soaring group is much different than that going to the general public. What is the goal? Who is your target audience? Are you trying to create national attention? Are you trying to help the individual clubs in the ESL? Ask CASA, LASS, etc, what or if there is anything that would help them. Phil and Skip should have some input. As well as John Murr and John Hauff. What would help CASA may be very different than what would help LISF. It may mean making personal presentations to the power clubs to garner some interest in soaring, and to soaring clubs to garner interest in competition. When only one or two people from the hosting club show up for an ESL contest, then what will bring more individual club members out? Now, that said for PR. ESL needs a brochure explaining what IT is and what it's goals are. The brochure needs to promote the benefits of competition, encourage participation and make ESL attractive. That said, I would like to see ESL develop and promote a single big contest like Mid-South or Visalia. One EAST COAST major competition. It is expensive to go to 6 or 7 contests and I noticed that the number of those actually getting in their 6 contests for ESL scoring, has dropped to a very small group. Reducing the requirement to the one big and best 3 might be an idea. You can go to three weekends and still not get six contests in if one day is a bust. Attending more contests is a way to improve your score, but not going to all of them won't totally knock you out. Anyhow, just food for thought. Tom - Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Soaring@airage.com Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2005 1:19 AM Subject: [RCSE] Re: PR for clubs I know you asked for personal off-list correspondence, but I feel this may be of use to general readership as well, so I'm putting it here in case it can help others. I need to put together a PR packet, and contact newspapers in advance of contests and put us on the map with the magazines too. I have ideas and I am sure many of you do to. I want some guidance from people who have actually done the PR job. ... I need to know what worked, what didn't. How to make contacts with the Newspapers, what belongs in the PR packet. We are looking to attract new membership, either kids, or adults, never flown, or have flown other disciplines. There are many avenues to pursue, many outlets, some of these are not always apparent. I did PR for my club activities for a while, always got the Tv stations to come out, and got nice articles written up in the paper. Events got good attendance and we were a familiar name to the local government people. For TV/radio stations, you send a press release to the news director or assignment desk and a copy to the public affairs director, and it helps to compose it in the typical format (which you can find examples of by googling). For papers, the Assignment Editor or just the main Editor works. Look up and use their name if you can, the personal touch gets noticed. Keep it short and factual, W,W,W,W, and H. but since TV is a business of images, you have to hint at what parts of this activity will be visually interesting. One time we were doing a simple spot landing contest, but because we painted up a few sheets of plywood gray and called it a Top Gun- movie-styled carrier landing contest with photo-ops, we got them to come out and see us, even in the rain, and make a segment out of it. For radio and print, you want to find a hook that appeals to a certain reporter's or hosts pet subject. Education is one natural, because our hobby/sport has so many applications in that area, from science, to history, to math, to English lit (poems like High Flight, books like The Little Prince, Night Flight, etc.). You could work on doing a historical reenactment of some local
Re: [RCSE] Re: PR for clubs
Thanks, that is a great start.Once I get started putting together a list of things, I might need to bounce some questions off you, would that be alright? I was surprised you indicated short and factual... I was thinking verbose so they could pick out any area that might be of interest to them to use.. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. I was planning on describring the different types of planes, how one starts, how things evolve... bringing them through.. I guess that would be too much. So you have already give me a direction. Thanks Mark. -- Jeff Steifel RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send subscribe and unsubscribe requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
[RCSE] Re: PR for clubs
I know you asked for personal off-list correspondence, but I feel this may be of use to general readership as well, so I'm putting it here in case it can help others. I need to put together a PR packet, and contact newspapers in advance of contests and put us on the map with the magazines too. I have ideas and I am sure many of you do to. I want some guidance from people who have actually done the PR job. ... I need to know what worked, what didn't. How to make contacts with the Newspapers, what belongs in the PR packet. We are looking to attract new membership, either kids, or adults, never flown, or have flown other disciplines. There are many avenues to pursue, many outlets, some of these are not always apparent. I did PR for my club activities for a while, always got the Tv stations to come out, and got nice articles written up in the paper. Events got good attendance and we were a familiar name to the local government people. For TV/radio stations, you send a press release to the news director or assignment desk and a copy to the public affairs director, and it helps to compose it in the typical format (which you can find examples of by googling). For papers, the Assignment Editor or just the main Editor works. Look up and use their name if you can, the personal touch gets noticed. Keep it short and factual, W,W,W,W, and H. but since TV is a business of images, you have to hint at what parts of this activity will be visually interesting. One time we were doing a simple spot landing contest, but because we painted up a few sheets of plywood gray and called it a Top Gun- movie-styled carrier landing contest with photo-ops, we got them to come out and see us, even in the rain, and make a segment out of it. For radio and print, you want to find a hook that appeals to a certain reporter's or hosts pet subject. Education is one natural, because our hobby/sport has so many applications in that area, from science, to history, to math, to English lit (poems like High Flight, books like The Little Prince, Night Flight, etc.). You could work on doing a historical reenactment of some local historic aviation event. In February, maybe recreate a Bessy Coleman Flight, or a Tuskeegee Airmen escort mission with checker-tailed P-51's. You get the idea. Find the local hook into area history or culture, and put the prop-er spin on it. For example, my town was on Lindbergh's airmail route, I would try to do some demo flights in the undeveloped land where he use to take off from. Any aviation-related anniversary may present you such an opportunity. If you were to fly an RC missing man formation for someone who's passed away, don't you think a photo editor would be curious? One time we did a grade school demo fly, the reporter got hooked on one little casual comment we made, about how kids working on building and flying these planes were too busy to mess around with drugs, and that became the hook for his whole coverage, how this was a great, wholesome activity. I wish that was planned, because the standard coverage reporters do on our hobby is overgrown man-children and their toys. It's an easy story to do, it writes itself, and if they are lazy or pressed for time, they'll go to that theme always. You have to give them more, a fresh angle. I think there's not enough women in aviation, and I think a special girls fly day would be a great event. I bet your gears are turning already, with better ideas than these! Standard PSA type releases should be sent out to the attention of the Public Affairs Director at all the local tv, radio, and cable outlets. It's free, but the timing and placement are not usually that great, unless they feel like tying it into news coverage they are doing... You can also often get someone to do a full show about you for the local cable access channel, or you can get access to the TV gear and make the show yourself, even make it a monthly deal! If you combine an event like a fun fly with something like a charity fundraiser for the local scouts or a scholarship or etc. that's gold. Get with a school to support a science fair type project with an aviation theme, or to do one of those historical reenactments mentioned before. Things like a heavy-lift design contest or paper-plane design-and-fly are a natural. Even if these things don't all directly translate to RC gliders, they all lead to the same good place, and your club WILL benefit. If you have a 1st of the New-year frozen-fingers contest, let the local Tv and paper know about the photo-op a couple days ahead, those kinds of holidays are often slow news days and they need cute local-flavored filler. Mall shows are always a good way to attract attention. Have videos and a simulator available, even do some actual building onsite so show how easy it can be. Order up the premade literature and pamphlets AMA makes, they are a good start, then use them
