5 Tips for Planning Your First Press Conference

By: Samantha McCain

For the last five months, I have been interning with a local community foundation. It has been, by far, the most rewarding and challenging public relations work I have done to date.

Recently, our Executive Director tasked me with planning a press conference for one of our funds. I have worked in many different realms of PR, but media relations have not been one of them. Even as confident as I am in other areas of PR, I was a little (A LOT) hesitant; but I like a good challenge, so plan I did.

Online resources were a tad low in the “HELP ME I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING” department, so I followed my gut and went for it.  For your planning pleasure, here are a few nuggets of wisdom to help anyone as they embark on planning a press conference.

1. Make a list! I am a listing fanatic. I create to-do lists daily, and then I merge at the end of the day for the next day.

Make a list of everything that needs to be done and a time line for yourself. If you don’t give yourself a deadline, tasks will begin to overlap and become overwhelming. Be sure to write down questions you need to ask, and it also helps to list important people that need to be involved.  Find your story and figure out what will help the media make an appearance… because after all – it’s not much of a press conference without them.

2. Know who you need to talk to. Our foundation works with A LOT of different organizations and projects in the community.  Knowing the president of the organization we represented was key to planning this event. It was important for me to figure out what he wanted represented at the press conference and how he saw the day unfolding. From my initial meeting with him, I also realized that there were about 5 other people that I needed to talk to as well.

3. Be sure all parties involved are on the same page. For our particular event, we needed to coordinate with the local police department AND the mayor.  It was pivotal to book these two departments to tell our story.  Communicating with the public information coordinators for these two offices helped keep our event on the fast track of success. It was important to have all three of us on the same page with the who, what, when, where, and how.

4. Befriend the media and PICK UP THE PHONE. We should always be fostering relationships with our media entities. However, if this is your first time working in media relations (Hey, that was me!) – know your outlets, and those that report on specific topics and beats.  This only takes a little background research.  Check out their respective web sites and look at past stories they’ve written.  THEN, pick up the phone. I will say it again, PICK UP THE PHONE.  It’s so easy to send an e-mail, but you will garner a more effective response from an initial phone call.

A week and a half before the event, I called our four major news outlets and spoke with specific reporters.  I asked them if they were familiar with our organization and the fund we represented.  Lucky for us, the organization had already been in the news and their interests were peaked.  THEY asked me to e-mail them follow up information.  When I e-mailed the media advisory, I told them that I would follow up in a week by phone.  All four e-mailed me back with a commitment to be there. It only took three tiny steps.

5. Media Kits are essential. They may seem a bit old-fashioned in the world of everything social media, but we felt it was important to hand the media everything they needed to know about our organization and then let them retell our story in the manner they saw fit.  We trust our media and wanted to help them where we could.  They have deadlines, and if it saves them 10 minutes of Internet searching, then we’ve served our purpose.

For our event, we included a brochure about our foundation, a brochure about the organization featured in our press conference, a fact sheet about both, a news release AND the agenda for the press conference.

Connect with Samantha: @samemac | http://samanthamccain.wordpress.com/