Are you thinking about Breast Cancer?

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and PR professionals who aren't thinking about it yet may already be behind schedule.

It's a great month and serves an important function, but it is also a period that creates an overflow at media outlets across the country. How you approach the media will make a huge difference in helping your client with the vital role of increasing awareness and education.

A couple years ago, I was editor and publisher of a string of papers just across the bay from Corpus Christi, Texas. We were between managing editors so I was engaged in those duties as well as my own.

As Breast Cancer Awareness Month approached, so too did the press releases. Lots of press releases. Tons of press releases.

It seemed to me that every hospital, every clinic, every women's health organization, women's advocacy organization and countless other groups were engaged in awareness, education and fund-raising campaigns during the month of October.

I remember my assistant setting up a folder on the computer and she filed all items received in the folder. While there was admittedly some duplication (some agencies sent press releases to every single employee at the paper), at the end of the first week, the folder contained over 100 press releases.

While this is great, there was no possible way our papers could support them all by running the press releases.

We made a decision. We'd run a page every single issue during the month of October (these were weekly papers) and the pages would be 100 percent local content, featuring local survivors, local doctors, local experts and local advocates.

Having worked in PR, I am sympathetic to the young person who has the task of calling to follow up on the press releases, and I explained our position and our local slant carefully. And everyone was very understanding.

“But our cancer center is in Texas,” one told me once, thinking that was local enough. I explained to her that Texas is a big place and the cancer center in question was a ten-hour drive away.

He sent me a press release and various materials from a noted cancer hospital in Houston. Still three hours away and not local. I explained I needed the local tie, and for Breast Cancer Awareness Month we were all set with local resources.

He thanked me for my time and moved on. Seemed nice enough. What I didn't know at the time was he'd figured it out.

About a month later he called and told me something stunning that I did not know. The county in which my papers circulated was the highest in the entire state in terms of preventable deaths from treatable cancers, particularly prostate and skin cancers.

He took it a step further. After checking with them of course, he had patients that had been treated at the hospital – patients from our county, call me and agree to be interviewed. His hospital was prominently featured, along with many local experts, in a very large article on the subject.

If you are tasked with promoting an organization's effort during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or any other period of time in which many organizations are working toward a common cause, keep this in mind...and it's from an insider:

• Provide me the angle that suits my media outlet. For a small town paper, it's something local. If you represent a Nashville hospital, a few minutes of leg work should turn up cancer survivors treated by your client from darned near every small town around Nashville. For a magazine about stamp collecting, it could be a story about the breast cancer stamp from a few years ago. A trade pub could run a story about a prominent industry leader who is a survivor.
• Don't turn me off by forgetting the point. There were one or two folks who were so bent on press for their clients – rather than the real point, which was increasing awareness – that I got turned off to them. Of course, I'm not admitting to holding a grudge as an editor, I'm just sayin'.
• Tell me something I didn't know and make sure it is something that I simply cannot ignore. The statistic about the county's rate of preventable cancer deaths was stunning to me, and it was something I'd have been irresponsible to ignore.
• And the best one to me – work ahead and ask the editor, “how can I help you with your coverage this year?”

Simple points. Pretty common points when working in media relations, really, but if you follow them and take just a little extra time, you may find yourself getting quite a bit more ink, air and bytes for your clients.