Did you include a contact source?

In top, right-hand corner of first page, directly beneath your company name, there should be a line that states, "For further information, contact." A name and telephone number should follow. The editor must have somebody in your business to call to answer questions or to be interviewed about your news item. If you can only be reached during certain hours, specify them.

Have you included a dateline?

The best press releases have a dateline with city in which business is based and date release is written. Every press release needs a dateline so that editor can tell when it was mailed. Nobody wants to cover an old story that has lost its timeliness.

The other morning during my favorite radio talk show they mentioned this guy who wrote a book about selling water beds which was coming out next week. How you do think this guy got radio stations to talk about this....you got it - a press release or a publicist who sent a press release.

Copyright DeFiore Enterprises 2002

Why doesn’t she “just get a job?” Because she can live better on welfare. You begin to see complexity of problem. She may be “homeless” but she isn’t stupid.

You see a man with 4 children and no wife, who hasn’t a suit, washing machine, computer, fax machine or answering machine to take calls while he’s out looking for a job, and you begin to see complexity of problem. “Why doesn’t he just get a job?” becomes “How could he get a job?”

NO ONE EVER CONVINCED ANYONE BY LOGIC

I could talk till I was blue in face about “homelessness,” and not have any impact, while 30 minutes in a homeless shelter, seeing real people, seeing a “face” instead of “a problem,” reached in and touched people at their core. There’s no place for “cold logic” in a homeless shelter. It assaults your heart, and therefore it assaults your brain.

EMOTIONS TAKE PRECEDENCE

Emotions have a stronger impact, because they’re essential to our survival. We don’t need to know a whole lot about bear that’s standing in front of us snarling; in fact if we DO stop to think, our life will be at risk, so our brain pumps us full of “fight or flight” chemicals which preclude thinking and cause us to TAKE ACTION.

MOTIVATION

In conducting tours of homeless shelter, just act was my main objective. I knew that reality of a face-to-face encounter would accomplish what I couldn’t, and eventually didn’t even try, to do. Motivation is real when it comes from heart. Whatever person decided to do after touring shelter, was between them and their heart.

The outcome was always a new understanding of a situation that had previously existed as “cold facts” in their head. The changed behaviors it elicited were different—some decided to volunteer, some sent a check, some went back to organize others, but all were touched.

It never failed to touch me to go over there, and that showed too.

People’s general reaction changed from “there’s a problem,” to “what can I do?’ And each individual, moved from his or her armchair in front of tv to reality of problem, as represented by real human beings, decided that there was something THEY could do. They decided they wanted to make a difference.

I used it to motivate myself as well. Sitting over in my office, overwhelmed by workload and enormity of a problem for which there is no solution except day-by-day, one-by-one, I was often discouraged. A trip over to shelter was always antidote to my flagging energy.

THE PROS

The Archbishop of San Antonio often spoke at our fund-raising banquets. He always began by giving a specific example of a specific person in a specific encounter. He put a face to a “problem,” touched people at feelings level, and caused change.

Motivation is not a thinking word.