It is the 40th anniversary of the film Cathy Come Home

Also this year, following on from on their Britain on the Move campaign, ITV are looking to commission programmes all about "young people engaged in community action". Jane Luca, Controller of Regional Affairs at ITV is running the season :

Ian Russell, Chair of the Russell Commission said : “The association of the ITV brand and their ability to reach out to millions of people is key to this initiative. The ITV Regional News service reaches an average of 23.7 million viewers which is 46% of the UK population. We are delighted that ITV wish to support the aims of Russell Commission using regional news and bespoke programming to highlight, inspire and motivate young people to consider volunteering as a means to developing their potential. “

I work in development of social action campaigns for the BBC, including the homelessness one. We try to consult and disseminate information as widely as possible among the charity sector. Who have you spoken to, as your request hasn't come through to us?

No -- I don't think you should censor requests. An insensitive request isn't the same as an abuse of the service. I think if you get a request that you think is insensitive you have two choices:
1) Ignore it.
2) Contact the journalist and explain your point of view.
It's just the nature of some publications that those are the sort of stories that they're after. If anything, it's better that charities do see the requests, so they can choose to have some (perhaps less sensationalist) input into the stories if they want to.

A s someone who works both as a freelance journalist and as a charity press officer, I think charities would be shooting themselves in the foot to ignore requests from journalists who don't have a commission. While obviously you will have to weigh up the time and effort involved in helping against how useful/likley the coverage would be, very many articles are not 100% commissioned untill the case studies are in place. The journalist is unlikely to spend a lot of time chasing case studies unless he or she thinks he or she has a pretty good chance of placing the article, so you might be missing out by not helping. Although I do agree that journalists should be upfront in their messages about whether an article has been commissioned or not.

Sorry for this

Just a reminder that the charity MediaWise - http://www.mediawise.org.uk or 0117 93 99 333 - has done sterling work in the area of media coverage of suicide, both in the UK and overseas, and can often be helpful to fellow charities with advice, training, codes of conduct etc for other sensitive or difficult issues.

Maybe he has a point. There have been several occassions recently where charities have jumped on the "pr bandwagon".

Hello, having previously worked for an organisation which assisted many people facing debt problems, I think the main source of reluctance is the sense among people in financial difficulty that they will be seen as having been responsible for their circumstances, and that they therefore risk an unsympathetic response if they speak about them. Those who feel more comfortable speaking about health problems (though depends what these are) are perhaps more confident of their story being received with sensitivity and sympathy because they are often less likely to be blamed in any way for their situation. I suspect it's a similar case for those dealing with clients who have problems with gambling, alcohol or drug addiction. Audiences can be very judgemental, and shame and fear of stigma are understandably powerful disincentives to talking about one's difficulties. Of course, were more people to talk about these sorts of difficulties, we might expect that stigma to lessen, but it's a lot to ask of someone who has no experience of nor desire for public attention.

It's not just the elderly... Vulnerable adults generally - including those with learning disabilities or mental health problems - don't generate the kind of press coverage that children do - they're simply not "heart-breaking" enough.

Recent examples are the damning reports published by the Healthcare Commission into the long-stay hospitals in Cornwall, and Sutton and Merton Primary Care Trusts. While the reports themselves received a reasonable level of coverage in the press, there was nothing like the type of follow up that the country saw with the Climbie enquiry.

It is still acceptable to shut these people away. This is true whether they are people living in a long-stay institution, long deemed unacceptable but for which the closure dates continue to move every year, meaning that people continue to be subjected to physical or sexual abuse; or whether it's the elderly.

That's interesting about no Word docs or PDFs. When journalists sign up to our press release email service, the vast majority opt for having them sent as Word doc attachments rather than the text in the body of the email.

I guess a lot of charities work with part-time staff who just aren't there after five. In our case, emails are answered pretty promptly as we check on them from home, but phone calls... well...

I read that post on freelancewritingtips.com and it was an eye-opener. I didn't realise that the women who regularly feature in the glossy magazines as 'case studies' have been actually screened for being photogenic. How hypocritical is that?!

Hello there, I wanted to drop by to point you to a piece I've just put on my blog about advice for charities about what can make a feature - not for the TV but for national publications, I wrote this in light of the recent furore around journalists' requests which showed no respect for the people they were hoping to speak to:

http://www.freelancewritingtips.com/2007/07/advice-for-char.html

Thanks for reading! All the best to you,
Linda

It is fair to say that the Guardian and Telegraph don't just "want to create their own social networks" -

They're already operational:

- Particularly handy for people working in international NGOs:
http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/ has 'My Guardian Weekly' which includes reader map search to find other Guardian Weekly readers and website users. Also, "If you know of an experience related to news events that you think is of interest, you can submit an article to our site editor for consideration."

This is in addition to the thriving debate on the Guardian's Comment is Free site which has throves of regulars engaging in long 'letter to the editor' debates: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/i

The Telegraph has http://my.telegraph.co.uk/ where you can "start a blog, join debates, bookmark articles and form a community".

I know it's probably not a very popular opinion round these parts, but I thought his speech was great.

Whether we like it or not, he knows what he's talking about. Us charity PR types need to stop moaning about the way the media world works and start using it to our advantage.

Thanks for the info. We have taken notes!

What an intelligent article. It's pointless charity pr people constantly criticising the media, but we should try to influence what they publish by providing good quality stories.

It is great to see how Prohelp and BITC have partnered up to deliver this free marketing, but at the end of the day, is this about having meaningful pro-bono, or to find new business?

For social enterprises and SMEs there is such value in good advice and good marketing, but there is also a risk that they don't realise they are marketing themselves as a client when they may not be ready 'to be PR'd'

I think the strides in online usage for fundraising purposes (especially events promotion and sponsorship) was a very natural occurence as the kinds of people engaged in fundraising events would generally be perceived to be more proactive and comfortable online already , more likely candidates for online activity. It was easy for fundraisers to see where online would fit as a natural enhancement and a way of making transactions easier.
The wider stakeholder relationship building aspect is more complex because charities' beneficiaries and volunteers vary wildly. So beyond getting media articles into the online environment, it can be difficult to know how many of your stakeholders are linked into online comms.

At a recent voluntary sector conference the room voted on how fast they thought their charity would be likely to get going with social media strategy - whilst most were eager to get on with it there were a few in the room who thought their organisation would want to wait until the demographic of their stakeholders 'caught up' with the perceived community involved in social media.
Having said all that some brilliant work is being done by some charities online as you mentioned. Its great to see it profiled here - i think the communicaitons team's responsibility now is to get familiar with the techniques, identify what they want to achieve with it and how they will measure, their outcomes and start investing the time.

A white paper on Cloud Computing by a guy called Jon Pyke, Chief Strategy Officer at Cordys says that on current trajectory 'by 2049 a $1k computer will hav ethe computational power of the entire human race'. If thats right we better keep up!

interesting post. on the surface it could be mistaken as a jibe at communicators for not being as 'proactive' as fundraisers.

i think that's a misunderstanding or the nature and position of those two roles within a charitable organisation - fundraising often seems to take a higher priority in both funding and resourcing leaving comms to 'service' the dominant department and play catch up in terms of its own development.

2.0 techniques are interesting but if comms are expected to do them in addition to traditional techniques there becomes a resultant resource issue for the charity.

the new media way involves spending more time creating content, managing those spaces and learning those new technologies. often traditional faces in management will question the worth of exploring and learning these new techniques or will not allocate the required resources.

if communicators are given the money time and resources to explore new media then they will undoubtedly find creative ways to use 2.0 to bring their organisation into the brave new world

Its also far far easier to get budget and resource for your project if it directly raises money. Or, put it another way, how do you measure ' successful engagement'?

There's also probably something about how charity communications often need to be signed off to the nth degree whereas a fundraising ask can be more simple and direct.