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| Issue No. 200508
| August 2005
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The PIOnet Newsletter is sponsored by Newswise and Dick Jones Communications
Feature Editor: Dick Jones Editor/Publisher: Roger Johnson
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PIOnet Newsletter is produced monthly to support media relations' vital role in integrated marketing for your institution. This role is not always adequately recognized, understood, or acknowledged. Our goal is to give you data, arguments, evidence, and ideas to enhance the understanding of and appreciation for media relations at your institution.
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'Inside Baseball' and Media Relations
by Dick Jones
Dick Jones Communications
A colleague of mine once scored two major hits in the same Sunday New York Times business section with separate stories featuring faculty from the business school (B-School) whose media relations interests he represented.
"The dean must be ecstatic," I congratulated him.
"Actually, no," he said. The dean, in a communication through the director of marketing, let it be known that he was "pleased" that the school was in the Sunday New York Times, but less than pleased about the agents of this publicity -- two faculty members who were not on the tenure track.
This sort of "inside baseball" drives media relations practitioners nuts. It also serves to highlight the separate cultures in which academics and public relations professionals travel -- the status-conscious world of the academy and the realm of journalism that basically cares only for an interesting story.
Nine-hundred and ninety-nine people in a thousand who saw that story never thought to ask whether the sources were on the tenure track or not. The other one-tenth of a percent were found grumbling in the faculty lounge.
Nine-hundred and ninety-nine people in a thousand thought well of Old Siwash's B-School when they read about the interesting work the quoted faculty members were doing, not caring a fig whether those faculty members were research associates, contract instructors, untenured assistant professors, tenured associate professors, or proud occupiers of an endowed chair.
Good stories are where you find them. Sometimes you find them among faculty who are not on the tenure track. In such cases, the dean should congratulate himself on the wisdom of hiring such sharp fellows and accept the positive visibility with grace. And he should find ways to use this visibility in admissions and fund raising.
Somewhat similar to the story of the ungrateful dean is the true tale of the college executive who, when he learned that a professor from the school was to be on NBC's "Meet The Press" to discuss with Tim Russert the phenomenon of serial murder, worried aloud about whether this was something the college wanted to be known for.
Earth to administrator: Just because Old Siwash has a professor who teaches about the phenomenon of serial murder does not mean that the college advocates serial murder. Let's have a little respect for the ability of the audience to think abstractly.
In fairness, the conflicts exemplified by the two anecdotes above seem to occur less often than in years past. I think it's because more college leaders are savvy about marketing these days. But every once in a while I still get brought up straight by the clash of cultures. To some extent, it's always going to be there. Just remember, good stories are where you find them.
I would welcome reading on the listserv any advice PIONet members have for successfully educating administrators. Frankly, I've never made much progress on changing the minds of those who see things differently than I do on this issue. I could use the help. Let's discuss it on PIOnet.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Taking Another Look at Telephone Surveys
by Zoltan Bedy
State University of New York at Oswego
Those of us who conduct surveys are well aware of the difficulties involved in getting folks to respond. In an oft-cited 1981 study of the University of Michigan's Survey of Consumer Attitudes (SCA), researchers reported a major decline in response rates from 1954 to 1976 -- a period during which the SCA was conducted in person. Up until the results of another SCA study were reported in 2000, the general perception, even among those involved in survey research, had been that response rates had continued to decline at about the same rate identified in the 1981 study. In the 2000 study, researchers Richard Curtin, Stanley Presser, and Eleanor Singer found that after the SCA began being conducted via telephone, the decrease in response rates for the period (1979 to 1996) was relatively minor compared to that reported in the 1981 study. But while the response-rate decrease was less than anticipated, the average number of calls required to complete an interview increased greatly -- from 3.9 in 1979 to 7.9 in 1996.
In a recent study ("Changes in Telephone Survey Nonresponse Rates over the Past Quarter Century," Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 87-98), Curtin, Presser, and Singer revisited their 2000 study and corrected some of the errors they found.
First, they discovered that the SCA response data used in their 2000 study (as well as in other publications) contained errors. Their 2005 study shows that the response-rate decline from 1979 to 1996 was actually larger than what was described in their 2000 study.
Second, at the time of Curtin, Presser, and Singer's earlier study, fewer than one in ten American households used caller ID. Between 1995 and 2000, that proportion grew to almost one in two -- an increase of some 500 percent in just five years. This study shows that the decrease in telephone survey response rates from 1997 to 2003 "was significantly steeper" than it was from 1979 to 1996. Curtin et al. questioned whether "this steep decline [could] be attributed to some degree to the widespread technology allowing potential survey respondents to screen unwanted calls."
While conducting the SCA, the University of Michigan places refusals into three distinct categories: by the selected respondent, by another adult in the household after the respondent has been selected, and by an informant before the respondent can be selected. Additionally, if a respondent tells an interviewer to call back another time to finish the interview and then avoids subsequent contact, the interaction is recorded as a missed call-back. In the 2005 study, Curtin et al. combine all four refusal types into one category, resulting in different conclusions than they reached in their 2000 study.
Curtin et al. found that response rates have declined significantly over the past 25 years, with an average decline of about three-quarters of a percentage point (0.74%) annually. That decline has been greater over the last few years, averaging 1.5 percentage points between 1997 and 2003. "The perception that it has become increasingly difficult to contact households by telephone, and that noncontacts have become a more substantial part of nonresponse, is borne out by these data," conclude the researchers. The relative role of noncontacts and refusals, however, has recently reversed, they determined.
Nonresponse from 1979 to 1996 was primarily due to noncontacts; the steeper rise in nonresponse after 1996 was due mostly to an increase in refusals. Although some have suggested that the SCA increase in noncontacts "may be partly due to the dramatic increase in the use of call-screening devices in the late-1990s," Curtin et al. speculate that the best explanation for the increase in both refusals and noncontacts over the past 25 years "may be the rapid growth in sales and survey phone calls during the period, though further work is required to document this."
In addition to the greater difficulty an organization may encounter in conducting survey research, the larger percentage of refusals and noncontacts (the general decrease in response rates) has increased survey costs. The downward trend in response rates and the upward trend in survey costs do not bode well for conducting survey research by telephone. "Although the long-term decline in response rates has sometimes been temporarily stemmed, response rates have rarely increased over time," state the researchers. "Thus, without better approaches to both contacting respondents and persuading them to be interviewed, the long-term future of telephone survey research does not appear promising."
Can the answer to this problem be online/Web surveys? In next month's PIOnet newsletter, we will try to answer that question by looking at a comparison of Web and phone surveys.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Book Review: The Jossey-Bass Guide to Strategic Communications for Nonprofits
by Lucas Bernays Held
Wallace Foundation
Several recent posts on the PIOnet listserve have asked a deceptively simple question: How do you write a communications plan?
I use the word "deceptively" because while it is relatively easy to create a document about what you plan to do in the area of communications, it is tougher to write a communications plan, in the sense of a series of steps designed to produce a single goal and where the reasoning behind the plan is clear.
Doing that almost always means bringing to the surface a series of messy questions with uncertain, and sometimes competing, answers: What is the goal of the communications? Whom are you trying to reach? Why are you recommending these strategies? And how will you measure success?
And that's even before one tackles the question of what the plan should actually include -- a question that can bring a variety of answers depending on whom you ask.
The Jossey-Bass Guide to Strategic Communications for Nonprofits: A Step-by-Step Guide to Working with the Media provides a helpful set of principles and some sound advice on these and other questions. Written by Kathy Bonk, Henry Griggs, and Emily Tynes -- founders of the Communications Consortium Media Center, a nonprofit that works with nonprofits and foundations -- the guide has as its goal to help make communication activities a central organizational concern.
To achieve this, the authors make several useful recommendations.
First, a plan should explicitly affirm and be driven by an organization's goals, its long-term vision, and its values. Situating a plan within the context of an institution's overall goals helps keep activities linked to central concerns, helps others see how communications is central, and provides a broad criterion for making choices about allocating scarce staff time and resources.
Second, a plan should specify a goal that is linked to a change that will benefit the institution. Such a change might include: enhancing overall visibility, encouraging financial contributions, recruiting volunteers, or reaching and informing those who can influence the way others perceive you or who can influence your future. The choice is not always obvious.
And third, the authors suggest that a plan have six essential elements. These are:
- An understanding of your target audience and how to reach it
- Research into past media coverage and public opinion about your institution or issues
- Messages to be delivered
- Materials to be produced
- Resources from which staff and equipment will be drawn
- A written work plan
It's worth noting two principles that lie behind this advice about what is in a plan. The first is that it is important to take an "outside-in" perspective, preferably based on research, recognizing that there is an (often stubborn) external context that can act as a neutralizing or countervailing force to any communication effort. This may be something as mundane as a lack of name recognition, anger over some problem, or a belief that, for example, an institution's public art museum is in fact not open to the public. The second is that it is equally important to take an "inside-out" perspective, recognizing that greater clarity -- and resonance -- in what is being said can help ensure that institutions and issues are understood.
If planning is difficult and time consuming, why do it?
Bearing in mind Henry Mintzberg's dictum that planning should take no more than 15 percent of an organization's time, and that not everything deserves a full-blown plan, there are at least four reasons. First, it can clarify one's own thinking and reveal choices that can be made intentionally rather than unintentionally. Second, as a shared internal document, it can build consensus within the organization and, as my colleague Don Filer has pointed out, insulate one from demands that arrive with an air of urgency but that don't advance important goals. Third, as the authors argue, a plan may actually produce better results because activities are informed by greater clarity about audiences, messages, and outcomes. And fourth, if the plan can bring to the surface major issues, or decision points, early on, it can provide a context for smaller and less consequential decisions.
In other texts, readers can find deeper discussion of communications theory, the positioning of academic institutions, how to formulate measurable objectives, and how to think beyond media (which is the focus of this book.) But as a primer on planning, The Jossey-Bass Guide to Strategic Communications for Nonprofits is a useful and intelligent guide.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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Best Practices: Features
by Roger Johnson
Newswise
At Newswise we have tried to base our communications strategies on objective data when possible and practical. We have consistently looked for, gathered, and reported data based on our interactions with journalists. Our relationships with more than 4,000 journalists and thousands of PIOs make this possible. Recently we have been exploring opportunities for expanding services to journalists and PIOs in the domain of feature articles.
Our goal is to provide writers with a new, creative way of browsing ideas to develop unique feature articles. New data about this issue have influenced our decision at Newswise to create a new feature service.
The new data include journalist and client feedback and survey results, and measurements of journalists' interaction with Newswise; they have stimulated us to revise our strategy with respect to feature news releases. We are sharing this information with PIOnet members in the hopes of exploring this topic in discussions and future articles.
Features span a wide range of categories and can be difficult to fit into a mold. They can be described as evergreen, expert offerings, human interest, ongoing science research (involving process rather than results), seasonal or topical items, advocacy issues and health campaigns, and trends or popular culture insights.
These stories have a different natural history than hard news. For example, feature stories may appear long after the ideas or events that stimulate them. They may be related to events in the news but with a "second day" or overview perspective. They may look at an event from a particular person's viewpoint, take a narrative approach, come from a unique or creative perspective, or appear more overtly shaped by the author's point of view.
We are also exploring the natural history of features on the PIO side. Whether a story is research news, a feature, or an announcement factors into how and to whom it is pitched or distributed. Features are often associated with exclusive pitches by PIOs, for example.
Our investigations have found that the factors determining the impact of feature pitches include:
- A large proportion of the journalists using Newswise are "feature reporters," as opposed to hard-news journalists working on daily deadline. Journalists are a diverse group, and as our subscribing journalists have grown to more than 4,000, we have expanded our ability to design services to fit their individual or group needs. Certain reporters are receptive and even eager for feature ideas.
- Feature releases on Newswise receive as many hits as research stories. Data and surveys show that feature releases are popular.
- Our clients achieve effectiveness with feature news items. They work; they generate clips.
First, a survey in a previous monthly report showed that a large portion of the more than 1,000 freelance journalists subscribing to Newswise are feature reporters and that they are eager to receive feature ideas. Freelancers said the following about feature releases:
- "In my experience, a freelancer is sort of at a disadvantage in trying to jump on news stories. But being aware of newspegs for bigger-picture trend stories is important, and if you could help with that, super."
- "That would be most valuable; the more story ideas, the better."
- "Adding feature ideas to current offerings would be even more helpful!"
- "Feature ideas would CERTAINLY be useful."
Second, we reviewed and compared the hit counts on the 4,800 research stories (56.4%), feature stories (32.2%), and announcements and policy stories (11.3%) contributed during the first eight months of 2005; the results are displayed in the following chart. Features garner as much interest as research news.
Third, our clients consistently report effectiveness with feature stories.
"Especially if they have a timely news hook, well-written feature ideas with broad appeal can find a home with media outlets," said Dick Jones of Dick Jones Communications in State College, PA. "We often score with an August story about football practice and how to avoid heat stroke and injuries."
"Each month for the last seven years we've sent several releases with public health messages featuring treatment options and patients," said Kara Gavin of the University of Michigan Health System. "They help maintain our leadership and provide public service."
"Our feature stories focus on a service and generate interest. They generate media interest because of the human interest," said Axel Bang of Axel F. Bang PR & Marketing in New York. "These releases also help consumers self refer. When we put out a story about a new chronic cough clinic, my hospital client received many calls."
We will continue to investigate the natural history of feature articles, how the public relations and journalism process works, and how distribution and information management can improve the process.
We invite your discussion of this topic on PIOnet.
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