We are living in the information age. It is an era marked by 24-hour news stations, flooded e-mail boxes and satellites that feed our constant and insatiable appetites for more and more bytes of sound, images and data. In this society where people seem more comfortable with Blackberries, cell phones and iPods than with handshakes, the media is not just all-consuming, it is ubiquitous. But if Marshall McLuhan was right and the medium is, indeed, the message, what importance does the media play in how nonprofits deliver their messages? Is it even a relationship worth cultivating? If so, how successful is the sector at garnering the coverage they need and want in order to effect the change or missions they pursue?

Nonprofits need to do better

According to IMPACS, the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society, media is an important vehicle for not-for-profits to deliver key messages. Committed to the protection and expansion of democracy and to strengthening civil society, the institute established a Communications Centre to help nonprofits and charities use a range of communications tools, including media, more effectively. “We firmly believe that not-for-profits need to do a better job of strategically using a range of communication tools,” says centre director, . But, she adds, while media is important, “It’s not everything. Media is only one way in which we can articulate policy positions and get the attention of policy makers.”

Sometimes, however, the audience that nonprofits are trying to reach requires the use of a different tool altogether. In order to determine if media is the right channel to pursue, Ludgate explains, it’s important for groups to analyze their specific goals, who their key audiences are, as well as their key messages and messengers. Out of that analysis comes a communications plan and the importance that media plays in that plan will become clear.

Learning how to communicate with the media

Once an organization has determined that media is, in fact, a necessary vehicle to convey their messages, many are then faced with the challenge of figuring out how to drive that vehicle. The media is often seen as foreign, incomprehensible, out of touch and out of reach. Furthermore, a large majority of nonprofits lack the resources, expertise, and even the language to successfully communicate with the gatekeepers of newspapers, radio and television.

, a journalism professor at the University of Toronto, has researched issues of diversity and the under-representation of minorities in the media. With past experience that includes working with the Innoversity Group and IMPACS, on whose board she still sits, she feels media must diversify and focus on solution-based journalism to enable positive nonprofit coverage. From the standpoint of the nonprofits, though, the major obstacles are lack of funding, training, and full-time communications staff. And this lack of media literacy is having a negative impact on the sector’s ability to be heard.

Lack of resources hinders media savvy

“The vast majority of the 80,000 charities in this country don’t know how to construct relationships with reporters,” Ludgate says. Knowing what is news and what isn’t and how to construct messages that are interesting and make sense to reporters is the media savvy many nonprofits need to learn. And though these challenges can plague any sector, businesses have the luxury of developing PR departments and governments can hire communication advisors. As Ludgate explains, “Many in our sector just don’t have the resources for media and communications departments. And it makes a big difference.”

Charles Pascal, executive director of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, agrees. Striving to promote social and economic justice, the foundation places great emphasis on the media as a tool for grantees. “We’re a communications organization,” he states. “Our interest is in changing the world and you can’t change the world unless the ideas we fund are understood and discussed.” Most nonprofits don’t have the resources or the sophistication to understand the role of the media and how different media have different challenges, but effective communication is understanding who’s on the receiving end of the message, says Pascal. “After all, if you want to build a bridge from one side of the river to the other, you better start by analyzing the soil on the other side of the river first.”

Moving beyond the reactive response

As executive director of the Canadian Mental Health Association in Ottawa, Marion Wright knows only too well the obstacles and consequences facing organizations trying to construct that bridge. “Historically there has not been a level of funding that really permits an agency to do anything other than to respond reactively,” she states. And since there are more bad stories about the mentally ill that are deemed newsworthy than good ones, Wright adds, “you find yourself responding to events without being able to educate the general public or community about the backdrop of the story in a proactive way.”

Josh Greenberg views the situation as one that is even more complex. As a 2003 post-doctoral research fellow at the School of Public Affairsat Carleton University, he examined the representations of the voluntary sector in the news media. While acknowledging the important role that resources – from budgets to staff sizes – play in determining media attention, he notes that volunteer organizations actually do get a lot of media attention. Much of the coverage, however, doesn’t delve into the complexity of the issues involved. Greenberg, now a professor at Carleton University’s School of Journalism explains that, over the years, the Income Tax Act has prevented registered charities from spending more than 10% of their budget on policy-related advocacy work. If groups want to maintain their charitable status, “they could provide food to the poor and education training for the mentally ill but what they couldn’t do was publicly criticize or call for changes in the policy framework that led to all these problems.” Without being able to address policy issues that affect them, organizations have softened their voice, turned inward, and don’t try to cultivate or develop media literacy skills, leading to what he calls an advocacy chill.

Becoming more proactive and strategic about media relations

The chill notwithstanding, Greenberg does admit that more and more nonprofits, witnessing the benefits of working with media, are starting to become more proactive and strategic in their media relations. One organization whose proactive approach to gaining media coverage led to successful results is the Alliance to End Homelessness. With the homeless situations worsening in Ottawa and without much media attention garnered over the ten years since their inception, the organization decided to grab the proverbial media bull by the horns. They created a report card on homelessness and devised a communications campaign to promote the card and the underlying issues. Greenberg, along with others at Carleton’s School of Journalism, acted as advisors, equipping the group with valuable information about the journalistic process. Because of the complexity of homelessness and the need to synthesize the issue to make sense to reporters, he suggested the alliance pick a few salient points and frame the issue in a way that appealed as broadly as possible.

In addition to her work with the Canadian Mental Health Association, Marion Wright is a member of the alliance’s steering committee. As such, she was one of the volunteers who worked with Greenberg, spending almost nine months creating the report card, with a media buzz as its accompaniment. “We applied the resources, time and people to ensure there was a different kind of message,” she says. “And we brought in people who know about the media – we asked and then sat back and listened.” One of the most notable consequences of alliance’s success is that reporters are now going to them for housing or homelessness issues. “They see them as a first, credible source for opinion and advice,” notes Greenberg.

Making media training a priority

Another approach that can help establish positive relationships with media is to invest in media training. For Jane Cullingworth, a five-day course organized by the Maytree Foundation in collaboration with IMPACS, was well worth the investment. As executive director of Skills for Change, an organization providing employment programs and language and skills upgrading for immigrants, one of the obstacles she faces is getting the media to appreciate the complexity of the issues she confronts daily. “Dealing with media is not necessarily something that is intuitive,” she says, “so understanding what drives media, what they are looking for, and their constraints was very important.”

Aside from taking part in workshops or working with organizations such as IMPACS, nonprofit groups can also improve their media savvy by recruiting those with communications expertise onto their boards or advisory groups. But no matter where you turn for help in order to garner positive media attention, there needs to be a desire, says Cullingworth – both from the board and the organization’s leadership. Further, she adds, you need to be prepared with facts, data, and one or two well-crafted messages that you want to get out – and make sure they do. “You can’t stop news stories, but what you can do is soften the landscape so they will be landing on the minds of people who may be more informed.”

Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance print and broadcast journalist living in Toronto.