For five years I served as a president of a non-profit organization. We were a small group of about 140 participants. As you can imagine our budget to advertise any fundraiser we might have or events that we would hold was practically nothing. Therefore a powerful press release was relied upon heavily.
We used press releases as our primary source of advertising. Our press releases allowed us to convey our organization's events to the public community in a newsworthy fashion. Without taking exact statistics on the events we held, I would say our press release is what drew ninety to ninety-five percent of everyone who attended.
Of course we did not hire some big time publication relations firm to draw these press releases up for us. We relied solely on our skills as a group. You should be able to write press releases this way also.
Through trial and error we were able to come up with some great press releases. Towards the end of my tenure with the organization our press releases, most of which I had written, were starting to be written in our local papers nearly verbatim.
If I could make any recommendation as to what is the most important part of the body of the press release it would be the lead paragraph itself. In your first paragraph you need to convey to the readers, the who, what, when, how, where and why of whatever it is you are trying to get across.
Even more difficult, but we learned over time, was to get our press release to sound like news and not an advertisement. By making that first paragraph of the press release sound like news and convey to the reader what the rest of the article will be about, really spoke volumes for us.
Another great thing that we did and I highly recommend was to read our local paper and find which writers specialized in what our organization was all about. Then knowing which writers we needed to send our press releases to, we would cater our press release to sound as if they, the newspaper writer, had actually written it.
For example, I was part of a youth sports organization. We learned which writers write on that subject, read their articles on a daily basis to learn their writing style, and then wrote our newsworthy press releases in the way they would write. This made it easier for them to decide whether or not they should print it. Imagine if you were a writer and had to come up with a new article everyday and do it on a tight timeline. It is tough to do. Now imagine if someone handed you a press release that was newsworthy and sounded like you had written it. Do you think that would make your job a lot easier? You bet it would!
By doing this it increased our print rate of our releases, as I said before, to ninety to ninety-five percent.
If you want your press release to be as successful as ours were follow these two pieces of advice and watch your print rate increase as well.
If you need more tips on writing well written press releases check out five more tips that I offer here.
