What was the news from the CASE Annual Conference for Media Relations Professionals in Philadelphia last week? Maybe it’s this: the profession has never stood more at the intersection between the public and our institutions. So maybe it’s not a surprise that this was the biggest turnout for this conference in several years.
The more than 100 media leaders and staff attending didn’t only come from colleges, universities and independent schools in more than 30 states and Canada. They also came from as far away as Ecuador, the United Arab Emirates, and Saipan. Christie Antoniewicz of CASE did a great job pulling it all together.
For CASE, this is a different kind of conference: since there is only one session at a time, all participants are part of every presentation and discussion. Being a faculty member alongside Katie Halberg of Wright University and Bob Finnerty of the Rochester Institute of Technology and our chair, Stacey Schmeidel of Smith College, was instructive enough. Add to it a group of participants with lots of ideas and questions, and I will be thinking for a long time about the issues we discussed. For those who couldn’t be there, here are a few quick takeaways:
Pitch quick: Don’t waste journalists’ time with press releases. The panel of journalists—Scott Jaschik from Insidehighered.com, Melissa Korn from the Wall Street Journal, and Stacy Palmer from Chronicle of Philanthropy—were clear: make your pitches short. Very short—as in, three sentences. As Scott memorably put it, “I’ve never not assigned a story because the pitch was too concise.”
Crises will keep on coming: Don’t wait another day to get your crisis-management plans in place (hopefully by now this is actually old news). The pre-conference survey made clear this was very much on attendees’ minds, and in our session on the topic Bob and I shared various ideas on getting ready. The next day, Bill Burger of Middlebury and Bill Kissick of St. Paul’s School shared stories of the rebounds that are possible with diligent crisis management.
Soundly source social media: Whoever is running your school’s social media accounts, as Katie noted, should read everything made public by the school, because that’s where honest and informed answers should come from.
Faculty partnerships count: Help faculty learn the ways of the media and they will be far more likely to help you. One of our guest speakers, Teresa Valerie Parrot, put it this way: faculty know this much about a topic (hands spread wide), media want to know this much (hands close together), and media will use this much (fingers barely apart). What conversations and training programs are you offering to build good partnerships with faculty?
Measurement matters: There are ways to measure ROI, and in most cases they don’t include Facebook “likes.” The key, as Nancy Collins noted in a guest presentation, is identifying in advance what indicators of substantive attention to stories matter and driving for those.
Advertorials have promise: Advertorials work if they’re done right. Bob’s examples of RIT work using advertorials gave compelling evidence of this fact. His team used advertorials to increase awareness and student recruitment in the Silicon Valley and engage alumni and corporate partners there in RIT’s co-op program.
Lead with issues: Finally, what do the media want? According to our media guests, in no uncertain terms the answer is: ideas about how your campus or school is tackling tough issues.
If you were unable to attend the CASE Annual Conference for Media Relations Professionals this year, listed below is a link to my presentations via SlideShare. Check out the #casemrp hashtag on Twitter as participants shared lots of other highlights that you might find useful as well.