Debt charity gets great local coverage from a bit of hard graft
By Will Hoyles on Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Last week debt advice charity StepChange garnered themselves an impressive spread of regional coverage through the smart use of highly regionalised figures. By simply comparing the number of calls to their helplines from one year to the next from residents of specific areas and spreading the news of any increases they’ve got coverage all over the UK.
They achieved coverage in Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Somerset, Leicester, Luton, Bath, Northampton, Swindon and the North West as well as in Wales.
It’s not clear whether this was the result of a blanket release that allowed journalists to pull out relevant statistics for themselves, if they produced a vast volume of tailored releases, or they simply called the journalists direct with the stats to hand but either way there is immense amount of slog involved spreading so many variations on the same statistic. The payoff can be huge however, particularly when the aim is to spread the word of your services to audience who possibly don’t pay much attention to the broadsheets and with a story that isn’t much interest to the tabloids.
It takes two things to put together a story like this – a fair bit of time and a decent media database – but as StepChange have shown the rewards are more than worth it.