Last year as the pandemic hit, Bay Rising, a growing alliance of community groups across the San Francisco Bay Area, realized they needed to pivot the support they were offering to coalition members. They asked us to conduct a series of trainings to support their members in building their basic media relations and outreach skills so they could employ these tactics as part of their efforts to organize low-income and POC communities around voting, civic engagement, and building power. We built the training series on a short timeline, thanks to our wealth of experience and Bay Rising’s strong network.
- The first training in the series is Working with Reporters. It’s designed to help organizers understand how people in the media do their jobs so that you could meet their needs, which increases the likelihood of generating coverage to serve your mission.
- The next session is Reaching Reporters: Media Events: helping folks recognize when a media event was the right choice and what the necessary elements are for success.
- The third session is designed to help folks develop spokesperson skills, so that when they have the media’s attention, they can maximize the opportunity — and represent themselves and their community with confidence, pride and power.
Our training sessions — whether in person or online — are very experience-driven, interactive and shaped by participation. These decks only give you one layer of the content — which may not be as useful out of context. But in the interest of getting resources in the hands of people who can use them as quickly as possible, and in response to ongoing requests, we want to make them easily available for download.
To hear more about upcoming trainings where you can see our team in action, please sign up here and follow us on Facebook or Twitter. We also recommend following Re/Frame, the Opportunity Agenda, the Op-Ed Project, Center for Story-based Strategy and other organizations leading great trainings and smart strategy in our field.