Building a Donated Media Strategy

You are working for a non-profit, and responsible for marketing fundraising programs and need to build an advertising strategy made up of entirely donated Public Service Announcement (PSA) placements. Oh, and you have no budget to hire a third party specialist. Where do you start? First, a basic understanding of PSAs is helpful. The best explanation and information about PSAs I found was on the website of The American College of Emergency Physicians (www.acep.org) - All About Public Service Announcements. There are plenty of good resources to be found - do a quick online search and read to your heart's content.

When I was responsible for PSA development and dissemination, I was the recipient of very good fortune - a media placement agency, one of the largest in the business, generously offered its services to the charity where I worked. While the charity was dealing with a "hot" issue, and its founders came from the media industry, the charity was not well-known and still struggled with brand recognition. This pro-bono partnership, along with an incredibly well-executed Ad Council campaign, allowed the charity to gain name-brand recognition in an incredibly short time through thoughtful, strategic, proactive PSA placement.  In the first full year of working with the volunteer media strategists on the agency's team, the Ad Council campaign was #1 in donated media. By its tenth anniversary, the charity and the issue it addressed had increased its general awareness to more than 50%.

This agency-charity partnership has changed the game a bit for charities, the Ad Council, and media outlets. If your organization has a relationship with a media agency, ask if they will donate placement services in-kind. This will give you access to a distribution channel that will save you time, and it will give the agency an opportunity to tout its philanthropic activities. If not, you can still develop a viable donated media strategy.  Here's how:


1. Do Research. Understand what the PSA landscape looks like and how to navigate it. A simple internet search on "How to get a PSA placed" will yield valuable step-by-step instructions, many created to assist in the placement of spots developed by the Ad Council. These steps are also true for any PSA campaign.

2. Know Your Audience. Who are you trying to reach? Is your audience local, regional or national? Are you trying to reach the general public, or a specific group of people? Knowing who you are hoping to attract will help you define the media you will need to focus on.

For example, a local fundraising event that aims to attract community members would benefit from well-placed out-of-home, radio spots and newspaper ads. If you want to drive donations during a specific time period from a broad constituency, national magazine, digital and national broadcast ads may be your best bet.

3. Identify Target Media - Do Your Homework. All major media outlets expect to be solicited by charities to run public service announcements (PSAs) and often have guidelines for accepting and running PSAs. Do your research to understand the guidelines for your target media outlet. Then identify the PSA Director for your outlet. This may take some time, but it is worth it to develop a dialog in order to place your PSA. (This is where having an agency partner can help you tremendously.)

4. Have Assets Ready. Be sure that the ads you wish to place are ready and can be shared with your target outlets. Media outlets will review your ads to confirm that they meet PSA standards; that it complies with the definition of being informational, specific to a non-profit or non-profit activity, and does not aim to sell anything. While you will not know the final submission specifications for the remnant space that you will eventually receive, you should have an example of what you would like the outlet to run.

5. Communicate. Be sure to reach out to the contacts you've made at the media outlets who have agreed to entertain your PSA placement requests. If you have been fortunate enough to secure donated media, don't forget to request the flight information and estimated value. 

6. Track and valuate. Using the information you receive from each media outlet that provides you with exposure, develop a media valuation report. This will help you correlate donated media to the in-kind value provided. 

Hope this is helpful - send me your questions!