Here's a simple and fun exercise for both your Monday morning press meeting and your next away day. Pick up the Sunday papers (or women's magazines or lads' mags or any category you like really) and get everybody in your team to skim read them and imagine which of your stories you could get placed in them.

So the scene is like this. It's 11am Monday morning and your fundraising manager is telling everybody which celebrity going on the latest challenge event could be placed in the colour supplements, then the CEO is waxing lyrically about how you should respond to the appalling coverage of the latest health story, while the new intern has identified the four business stories where you might have an angle.

The point is this. Too many charities start from the point of view of 'how can we broadcast to the world what we want to say' when in reality a more realistic approach may be to adopt a 'how can we wheedle our point of view into what the media are already saying'.

Another good way of using the same approach is to ask people at a staff conference or management team to come up with the headline or story that would be most likely to get them into any one of five publications (say the Sun, the Guardian, Heat, the Rochdale Echo and Third Sector). At one charity conference the winning group came up with 'charity boss in pants down drama'. After all, for the sake of media coverage CEOs need to be prepared to go that extra mile.

Joe Saxton is chair and founder of CharityComms. In his day job Joe is driver of ideas and co-founder of specialist research consultancy nfpSynergy