At its quintessence successful public relations are all about storytelling -- and each campaign or non-profit, irrespective of whom they might be has an excellent story to inform. It could take a bit to spot and massage your campaign's story and it could also need a bit of practice to refine delivering the messages and preparing for questions, but after you have settled on the dimensions of your story and who is best provided to tell it, then it becomes crucial to establish which audiences and supporters you want to steer who desires to hear and understand your story.

Naturally, the media is an audience in and of itself, but just as importantly it is a pipeline to your key supporters' a passage that also has to understand your message. Each organization wishes to speak and develop a dialogue with its supporters. If you're a regional or state organization a good way to efficiently reach these constituencies is through regular media tours -- which are simply a group of pre-arranged face to face conferences where reporters, editors, editorial writers and producers from stories organizations can interview your spokesman and write about it. Media tours sometimes cover multiple media markets in towns and can persist for 1 or 2 days or in a few cases much longer.

Actually it is generally less complicated and easier to do to just pick up the telephone and speak directly to reporters, but in numerous cases this is an a lot less impactful approach. Correspondents must be stroked and coming to them and meeting with them all alone turf can go a great distance in helping to sell your organization's story. There are at least 3 reasons to conduct media tours. First, it is very important the media and your fans know you and understand who you are and how you slot in.

Developing a relationship and familiarity with your audiences is a vital element of successful communications and regular contact with the press is critical. Second, when you have a particular message to propagate or reports to make, or if you're in a situation where you've got to answer complex questions, it can be done through media tour outreach. Eventually, when you must manage and influence editorial opinion it's important to go out on the road and talk with paper and magazine editorial writers and editorial boards so as to seek fair and balanced opinion coverage.

Scheduling media tours takes long term planning & commitment. It might take a month or even more to organize a media tour from identifying where you've got to go, to organizing conferences, logistics and doing the mandatory preparatory work developing a fully-formed message and background materials, coaching for interviews and practicing answering troublesome questions. But it is obviously worthwhile.