Keep journalists up to date
Daily newspapers are still the most important medium for reaching a broad public. Radio and television also have a large reach. To ensure that journalists find out about your petition, inform them and provide them with all relevant facts, pictures and an exciting, personal story about your concern. You should inform the press when you start your petition and, above all, invite them to all your offline actions and to hand over the petition. Details zur Übergabe
Please keep interested journalists up to date on any interim developments. Events that are thematically related to your petition, e.g. a holiday, a demonstration or a draft law are suitable as a starting point for a press release. Most people have no experience with this, but editors don't bite and they can't do more than say no. Let's go:
Collect contacts: Find email addresses and phone numbers of editorial teams that might be interested in your issue. Possible points of overlap are: same topics (e.g. specialist newspapers), regional proximity (local newspapers) or ideological proximity (same beliefs).
make contact: Call the editorial offices and ask which e-mail address is best to send your information to or ask for the contact of the editor. It's important to send a message to the right person or department, otherwise your information will be lost.
Write a press release: Send out a press release about your petition. It should present all the facts objectively and to the point and include contacts for more information. Press release checklist:
- Subject: A summary sentence that arouses curiosity. For example: 'Dresden woman starts sign language petition for deaf son'
- First paragraph: Here you can directly answer the questions who, what, when and where. No long introductory sentences!
- middle section: Here you answer the questions how and why and tell the backstory. There is room for interesting details here.
- Celebrities: If prominent personalities support your petition, let the press know. The same applies to politicians.
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Ending:
Please provide all further information here. Not to be missed
- the short link to the petition
- Your contact details (email address and telephone number) and the offer to be available as an interview partner
- Dates of your planned actions
- Write a maximum of one page.
- Send meaningful, good quality images.
Online: If an article about your petition has appeared online (almost all print articles also appear online), make sure to include the link to the petition! This way you will receive a lot of signatures and interested parties can keep up to date with the status of things. Be sure to call the editorial team later to point out a (still) missing link - we do that too, but we don't get every press report.
Supported by openPetition: We are here to help you with all of these steps. It is important that you keep us updated. If we notice that you are strongly committed, then we will also be committed to you. For example, if we learn of a planned handover, we can advise you and, if necessary, draw your attention to it via our channels.