INVOLVING YOUR COMMUNITY PARTNERS IN PSA PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT

How to Bridge the Gap Between National and Local Interests
By Bill Goodwill

Think for a moment that you are in charge of marketing for a major corporation with a field sales force of hundreds of people around the country. They are out there pounding the pavement, day in and day out, like Willy Loman, with a shoeshine and a smile.

When trying to introduce a new product or gain more sales from existing ones, would you overlook your field sales force…out there where the rubber meets the road? Of course not. That would be marketing suicide. Yet many national communications program managers overlook – or do not fully utilize – one of their most important assets – the people who can take a national issue and implement it locally.

Now apply this lesson to the non-profit world…let’s say you are responsible for implementing a national PSA campaign on an important social issue. How do you distribute it and what should be the role played by local community partners?

The controversy surrounding local vs national PSA distribution is nearly as old as the “science” of public service advertising itself. Most local public affairs specialists maintain they have a much better knowledge of the local media scene. And many of them do. From the national viewpoint, campaign planners recognize there are weak points in any local placement scheme, and there are geographic areas of the country too large for personal placement. From a PSA distributor’s perspective, both viewpoints are partially correct.

Faced with this conundrum then, what is the optimum method for distributing PSAs – nationally or locally? We believe a system that uses the best features of national and local PSA placement results in optimum impact.

“Your local partners should be able to help you transcend the gulf between national expectations and local reality…”

Your local partners should be able to help you transcend the gulf between national expectations and local reality, but you have to engage them in your outreach efforts and solicit their feedback.

Historically, many PSA campaign planners have overlooked their field offices when developing their campaign plan. Unquestionably, it is easier to simply send out PSA materials to media outlets without the extra burden of working through field offices. But they do so at their own marketing peril because local outreach can make the difference between a so-so campaign and one that performs off the charts.

It is not that difficult to involve your network of community partners, if you think of them from campaign design through evaluation. And here are the basic steps.

Step 1: Think Locally From the Start.

Just like politics, all PSAs are local. While we at the national level think nationally or globally, what or how we think of an issue is meaningless to the local community affairs director – the gatekeeper you must deal with to get your message on the air.

Before the copywriter and creative director begin to put pen to paper to write the script and think about visual concepts, it is important that they understand the local media mindset. The worst thing they can do is to try and think only of the message THEY want to convey, instead of the message the local audience wants to hear.

Local tagging is done more frequently for TV PSAs, because either the name of the local office, the station – or both – can be inserted easily by the station. We often do this for our clients and ship localized PSAs out directly to stations, or to the local office for hand delivery. There are special challenges for tagging radio because many stations want to use their own on-air talent to tag PSAs, as it permits them to brand the campaign for their station, making it more difficult to coordinate locally tagged PSAs.

Most common are TV end tags as shown here and you may want to use an 800 toll-free number in the tag instead of a local number for several reasons.

First, in many TV markets, there is signal spillover, meaning the TV signal may reach people in another city or even another state, and the viewers would be calling a number that may not be appropriate in their jurisdiction. Also, by using a toll-free number in the tag, calls can be traced and reports generated on the source of the calls, which can be used as part of the evaluation process.

A more exotic and complex tag is called the “donut” as shown here, wherein the front and back end are “national,” and the center or donut hole is a localized message. It is a complicated process, but can be very powerful if executed properly.

Step 2: Share Creative Strategy.

While it involves some extra effort, it is important to treat your field operatives as full partners in the PSA planning process, which starts with sharing the creative approach with them.

Since the campaign starts with creative development, you should share your creative plans or messages with your community partners. This is not to say they should have input on creative matters or message development, because we all know creating campaigns by committee doesn’t work. However your community partners are -or should be – a key element in getting your PSAs aired IF they are part of the campaign planning process from the beginning. It stands to reason that people will work harder at accomplishing a task if they feel they are included in the process.

In the older days we used newsletters and sales kits mailed to community partners to keep them updated on national plans and to show creative samples. However in the “new communications era,” it is all about the “Net.”

E-mail, intranets, a special space on your website, video teleconferences, GoTo Meeting and social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and My Space can all be used for this purpose.

The Digital Difference

Believe it or not, many non-profits spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a PSA campaign and then seem to want to keep it a secret. You should post all your PSAs for various media to the News Room on your website so they can be viewed and downloaded.

With today’s digital technology, PSAs can be posted in a format that is broadcast quality, so all your local partners have to do is download them, put them on a CD or DVD, and take them to the station. If a personal trip to the station is not possible, they can be emailed to the media, or posted on an ftp site for downloading.

The same applies for print PSA artwork or other types of background information such as localized fact sheets, editorials and copies of all collateral items, such as TV storyboards. All of these items should be posted to a site so local partners can see how materials were sent to media. You should also have additional copies made (in several different formats for TV) to be mailed to local outreach staff or to the media based on calls that are made locally.

The take away from Steps 1 and 2: make your field representatives feel like they are a full partner in the entire process of campaign design and implementation.

Step 3: Sharing the Distribution Plan

The next step is to determine how and where materials will be distributed (local versus national), and the areas where local partners will want media materials tagged for their jurisdiction. This requires very close coordination with your distributor which normally handles all these details, to make sure the right materials get to the right people in the right format.

In pre-Internet days this was a painful process with a lot of paperwork going back and forth between the local and national offices. However, again the Web provides the perfect solution.

Shown in the graphic above is custom software we developed to permit local community partners to order either national or tagged PSAs, tell us the formats and quantities they need, and whether they are to be mailed to them or to the station. Once they complete the form, it is transmitted directly to our dub house via email for fulfillment, making the process seamless and efficient.

Providing “Actionable” Distribution Reports

Next, it is very important to share your distribution reports with your local partners so they can see where the materials were sent. To do this, we develop mini-websites for client campaigns that are on a password protected area of our corporate site. After logging into their site, the user clicks on Distribution to see a list of stations where the PSAs were sent.

Distribution lists are posted to the site, broken out by the client’s particular geographic configuration, i.e. State, Chapter, Recruiting Station, Affiliate, etc., so community partners can easily see the lists that apply to their geographic area.

In an ideal world, these lists are “actionable,” meaning they provide key information for local partners to use in their outreach contacts. Using the data in these reports can make a big difference in the number of stations which use your PSAs. However, this only works if people read the reports, understand them and take action, and that is something no distributor can control.

The way we do it, is to show previous usage information for each station on our distribution reports, so clients can see which stations are light, moderate or heavy PSA users. We call this ranking system our Previous Usage Index (PUI). In another column, we report if the station has used a particular client’s PSA or not. As shown here, if there are media outlets that have not used a client’s PSAs (indicated by a dash in the OU column), but are heavy users of PSAs, (a PUI above 20), those outlets should be priorities for local contact.

This information shows where your local community partners should concentrate their efforts, and the lists contain full contact information which can easily be exported to Excel or other software packages, sorted in any way the user wants.

The take-away from Step 3: Share your distribution lists and make them “actionable” with information that can affect increased usage.

To ensure that materials get to stations, you should develop a local contact form and include it in your local outreach toolkit. Local public affairs staff can complete it after making media contacts and returned it to the national office. There it can be compiled into a national report showing where materials were delivered nationally and locally.

This is a very important step because if the materials are not delivered to media, not only are you wasting resources, you are missing exposure opportunities which could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Finally, you need to provide instructions on how to order additional materials, and how to tag materials locally if that is a requirement. All these materials can be placed on a DVD with a checklist of the DVD contents, such as the one shown above.

The take-away from Step 4: Provide samples to your local partners in a format they can easily present to the media and develop a feedback mechanism.