EFFECTIVE NEWS PITCHES BUILD COMMUNITY AWARENESS

Challenge: One of the largest community foundations in the U.S., the Oregon Community Foundation works with individuals, families, businesses and organizations to create and manage 2,800 charitable funds. The Richard P. Haugland Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation offered a $50,000 challenge grant to help fill a funding gap at Looking Glass – a Eugene nonprofit program it supports. Looking Glass, which provides outreach and other key services to at-risk youth in Lane County, needed to get the word out quickly so that the community could match those funds.

Solution: We recognized that local residents would want to support outreach to at-risk youths. After gathering information from OCF and Looking Glass, we crafted a press release and followed up with print, radio and television media to encourage them to produce stories on the campaign. The effort was successful, airing on two television stations, in the daily newspaper and on public radio. Looking Glass reported good donor response. This is just one of many examples of successful press pitches we’ve put together for OCF on everything from the reopening of a closed library in a small community to a large grant to benefit Alzheimer’s research. Our president also participates in monthly information-sharing meetings with the local OCF office and with statewide media relations staff.