The best thing about PR is that it’s free. When you do it right, it costs you nothing out of pocket. That’s why it’s perfect for at-home political activists whose budgets aren’t quite… Trumpian.
The second-best thing about PR is that it generates publicity that you cannot otherwise buy. Look, anyone with enough money can buy an ad on page six or seven of The New York Times, The Washington Post, or your hometown paper. All it takes is ample moolah.
But only PR can get you the cover.
Same goes for television: If you’ve got a big enough budget, you can buy ads wherever you want. (Case in point: MyPillow, which is somehow underwriting half of Fox News.) Of course, a good hunk of your audience will be fast-forwarding through the commercial break — or use the opportunity to go to the bathroom.
But only PR can get you profiled during the TV show itself — when everyone is still watching.
This matters greatly for credibility purposes. Everyone in America who’s older than, say, a preschooler realizes that commercials are fundamentally untrue — they’re just not believable. Commercials are bulls**t. But when you’re showcased on the show itself, not only do you attract far more eyeballs, you also receive the implied endorsement of the program and its host — that your story was so critically important, they just had to share it.
That’s why PR has traditionally had a three-to-one equivalency to ads, meaning the “earned media” is worth triple what an ad in the same space would cost.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Alas, there’s a big, unfortunate catch: PR is time-intensive.
Sadly, PR pros are cost-prohibitive for most businesses.
But if you’re an at-home conservative activist, you’re not really concerned with your ROI. It doesn’t matter how efficiently you’ve monetized your time; what matters to you is the advancement of conservative candidates, conservative principles, and conservative legislation. Right? Well, with very little PR training, you can have an oversized impact.
Here's what you do.
First, decide what kind of activist you’d like to be. Your best bet to affect change is focusing locally, but if your passions are elsewhere, that’s fine, too. Political activism is a “passion project” anyway. But the more specific you can be, the better. Are you mostly motivated by the Pro-Life cause? Or are you more of an economic populist? Perhaps you care about military issues?
Whatever it is, follow your passions.
Next, create a media list for your pet issue(s). If you’re concentrating on local issues, then you’ll want an email list consisting of your local daily newspaper, your local TV networks, and any news-talk radio stations. If your hometown is large enough, maybe a few local magazines and news-gossip blogs, too.
PR pros use subscription-based media software, which helps us build media lists super-fast, but anyone can create a list on their own. Ninety-five percent of the time, all the email addresses at an outlet are all formatted the same way, so once you figure out how to reach one journalist there, you know how to reach all of ‘em.
If you don’t really care about local issues and want to affect change on a national level, that’s perfectly fine — just build a media list that reflects your interests. If you’re a pro-gun activist, spend a little bit of time online, figure out the top ten-or-so pro-gun media outlets, and build your list.
In the old days, PR pros would pitch the news desk, because everything was rigidly controlled from atop; journalists and reporters did whatever their news director told ‘em to do. Nowadays, journalists have far more personal discretion, which is why I like to pitch ‘em directly: If they like the story, they’ll figure out a way to get it approved.
News directors have been largely depowered.
Media organizations don’t have large budgets anymore — but you can use that to your advantage: First of all, when you make your pitch, do all the hard work ahead of time. Make it ridiculously easy for the reporter to share your story with the masses. When you send ‘em content, write it exactly as you’d like to see it in print — because many journalists are actually lazy enough to run it verbatim!
For lazy, low-paid journalists, the most delicious fruit is the low-hanging fruit. The less work they have to do, the better.
This means your pitches must be custom tailored for each outlet.
I know it’s tempting to save yourself time and just blast all the outlets at once. It happens a lot: A press release gets sent to every frickin’ outlet in a region or industry (often with everyone’s names in the CC or BCC). Don’t do it! Journalists find it impersonal, unprofessional, and uninteresting.
Instead, you want each journalist to believe that this pitch was especially written for him or her exclusively. Personalize each pitch! If you want the journalist to take the time to personally read it, then you should take the time to personally write it.
No mass eblasts!
I find that pitches are more effective when you attack ‘em sequentially. For example, you could have the coolest, sexiest press release — but if your email subject line is mind-numbingly boring, nobody will read it. So, your first step is to create an enticing, personalized subject line. It doesn’t take much effort; just include the journalist’s name in the subject line, i.e. “Rebecca: Controversial New Legislation Will Ban Gun Rights for Law-Abiding Citizens.”
And then, in your opening sentence, include a throwaway line: “Hey Rebecca, I loved your [date] article about the erosion of gun rights in our community. (I’ve lived in [name of town] for 30 years.) Would you be interested in covering the following story? It touches on many of the same themes — only this time, the government overreach is even worse…”
Boom. Drop in your press release, include your contact info (name, number, email), and hit send.
For best results, hold yourself to extremely high standards: Don’t send a professional writer (and like it or not, journalists are professional writers) a press release riddled with spelling errors and typos. Nor should you send anything that ChatGPT regurgitates. Make it original, compelling, fun, and exciting!
Also, make sure you’re responsive. If a journalist emails or calls and you never answer, they’re gonna disregard your future press releases. Even if you’ve already given the story to a competing outlet, it’s your responsibility to build, grow, and nurture your relationship with every journalist on your list.
So play nice and play smart.
There’s no right or wrong way to pitch the press. It’s kind of like picking up a girl at a bar: if you try to copy someone else’s technique exactly, it probably won’t work. You need to use your own voice. For example, I’m goofy and playful — so most of my correspondence with journalists is light, jokey, and silly. I figure, if I’m wittier, funnier, and more enjoyable to collaborate with than the next guy, then I’m more likely to get repeat business. And it (mostly) works.
It fits my personality. Figure out a “voice” that fits yours.
And if a journalist tells you “No,” be a good sport about it. Hey, you lost today. It sucks! But tomorrow is a new day — and you’ll want to pitch that journalist again.
It’s positive to follow a journalist’s socials. In our modern media climate, a big part of a journalist’s value is predicated on the size and reach of their socials. So, following is good. Engaging is good.
But stalking is very, very bad!
Don’t go “like” every vacation photo or comment of EVERYTHING. If you creep the reporter out, I guarantee you, they’ll never call you. (Especially if you and the journalist are of different genders.)
PR is an outcome-based endeavor: either your pitch landed… or it didn’t. If your pitch worked, then congratulations! Try to figure out what was so effective and do it again next time. And if your pitch failed, then congratulations! If you can figure out what went wrong, then you can do better next time.
Because there always is a next time.
And once you figure out how do it right, not only can you win friends and influence people, a la Dale Carnegie, but you can even pull a page from “Conan the Barbarian”: Why do you do PR, young conservative warrior?
“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!”
(Only be nicer.)
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