Publicising Your Event
Recruiting Volunteers
There are many ways to recruit volunteers to help with your Spring Clean event. Why not try some of the following?
- Once you have registered your event, you will be able to use our online poster creator via your login account. This can be used to generate posters specific to your clean up. You will also receive an A3 poster with your Clean Up Kit.
- Put up posters in local shops, supermarkets, libraries, community and leisure centres, schools, church notice boards or volunteer centre (with permission from the relevant person).
- Create leaflets or flyers for distribution through your neighbours’ letterboxes, among your friends or to resident group/club members.
- Approach local groups, businesses etc in person to ask for their support: the personal approach is usually more successful than indirect communication.
- Try advertising on your local ic website, your group’s own website, Gumtree or on a social networking site such as Facebook, Bebo or Twitter.
Using the Media
Newspapers and radio stations are always on the look out for local stories to cover; and community clean ups can make excellent news pieces.
There are two key times to approach the media about your event:
- Before the event, as a way of drumming up support and calling for volunteers to assist with the clean up.
- After the event to feed back how many people took part and how much litter was collected.
Tips for targeting the media
Before approaching the media think about what you want to achieve. Think about the timing of your event: if you want to arrange a photocall with the local media, the morning is often preferable so that deadlines can be met for evening newspapers or broadcasts. If you want an article to appear, provide an interesting angle.
The best way to put forward your information is in a press release, which can be emailed or faxed to the media. It is also a good idea to write down all the key points if you want to call the news desk so that you don’t forget anything.
Make sure that in your briefing or press release you let the media know:
- Who is taking part
- What is interesting, unusual or unique about your event
- Where you are meeting and where you are cleaning up
- When your activity is taking place (day, date and time)
- Why you are doing the clean up in that particular area
- How you are going to do your clean up
Once you have the details of your event confirmed, contact the news desk of your local newspaper, radio or television station to let them know about it. You can usually get contact details from the internet or Directory Enquiries.
If you want to arrange for a reporter or photographer to attend the event make sure that you let them know at least one week beforehand so that the date can be put in their diary. It is often worth calling again the day before to remind them and find out if they are likely to attend.
For weekly newspapers it is also important that you check when the print deadline is to ensure you get information to the reporter in good time.
Template press releases
We have produced two sample news releases and a photo call announcement template which you are welcome to download, fill in, and use to publicise your clean up to the media.