As a non-profit or government agency, you have an obligation to keep your organization fresh on the minds of the men and women in your local community. For this reason, you should be planning your next public service announcement right now. How long has it been since your last PSA? If it’s been more than three months, you’re already behind. You should strive to make a public service announcement at least once every quarter. That’s once in January, once in April, once in July and once in October. Here are five reasons why releasing regular public service announcements it’s in your organization’s best interests.
1. Spread Your Message
When you make a public service announcement, the message your organization is attempting to convey is blasted out to the public loud and clear. A church may want to spread a message of goodness and for those in the community to be nicer to one another. A non-profit that raises money for Cancer research might want to encourage people to quit smoking; and the government agency EPA (environmental protection agency) might encourage people to recycle or stop littering. These are all examples of the underlying message of your PSA and the more public service announcements you produce, the more people get that message and possibly live by it.
2. Help Your Community
The main purpose of a PSA is usually to help the community in some way. You may tell your audience to look both ways before they cross the street or to be careful where they dig so they don’t hit power or gas lines. You may make a public service announcement that discusses choking prevention or one that encourages people to adopt a pet from the local animal shelter. Find a problem your community may be facing and try to help out. Those make the best PSAs.
3. Get More Funding
The more attention you receive, the more funding your organization is likely to receive. And what non-profit or government agency couldn’t use more funding? You know that old saying about the squeaky wheel getting the grease? The more noise you make or the more public service announcements you put out, the more money you’ll likely receive from donors in your local community and possibly elsewhere – it all depends on how far your public service announcement travels.
4. Get Everyone Involved
The best public service announcements are those that are published using the ideas of everyone involved. Take suggestions from your prominent members or whoever else wants to contribute. The idea is to make a public service announcement a group project so that everyone feels as though they contributed to the final product.
5. They Can Be Fun to Produce
Producing quarterly public service announcements can get tedious if you think of it as work. The trick is to have fun with it. Try to make your public service announcements entertaining. What sorts of PSAs would you like to see, hear or read? What sort of tips would make you stop and think? How can you make your audience laugh and think at the same time? These are challenging questions and they can be a lot of fun to come up with, especially if you get the entire organization involved in the public service announcement production process. Make it a game and you’ll likely churn out PSA after PSA on a regular basis.
You now have five reasons why your organization needs to publish more public service announcements, if you’re not doing so already. Focus on quarterly PSAs or at the very least do two or three a year. You’ll put yourself in the public eye, you’ll get more funding, you’ll help your community, get everyone involved and you’ll have fun, all while making yours one of the best known non-profits or government agencies in the area.
As an added note and tip, always make sure that your public service announcements are of the highest quality. If you or someone in your organization can’t produce quality work – that means high-tech animation, HD camera work, engaging copywriting etc. – then it might be prudent to hire a professional to produce the PSAs for you. Your message will get across much more efficiently and your audience will be more likely to retain the message you’re trying to convey, the underlying message, as well as the name of your organization. And that right there is the entire purpose of setting out to make a public service announcement in the first place.
