At one time in public relations, scissors and glue where two mainstays of the job. You would get press, either cut the article out of the publication yourself or get it pre cut from a clipping service, glue it and place it in a scrap book with all the PR for the year. At the end of the year you would file the book with others from years gone by and have another volume of archival material. Electronic media would be obtained from a broadcasting monitoring service and also be archived in neat rows of VCR tapes. Times have obviously changed though.
Archives for printed-materials
Each year our Department visits the Suffolk County Fire Academy to attend a lecture and do hands on work in the techniques needed to battle fires and incidents involving flammable gas and liquids.
I always enjoy this drill both as a firefighter and a PIO. Quite frankly the hands on portion, as any of you who has taken this kind of training know is quite spectacular as LP gas creates a pretty intense fireball.
As a PIO I look forward to the drill because I get some pretty neat pictures when I am not involved in an evolution and I get plenty of food for thought on how I can let the public know about flammable gas safety.
My buddy Tiger Schmittendorf who among several things writes the great blog Tiger Schmittendorf.com sent me a note correcting a typo on one of my recent postings. I appreciate Tiger’s observation. No matter how hard we try, proofreading, which is a big part of the work we do, is not a perfect process.
This is pretty cool. Today’s post is just a bunch of useless knowledge. Mark Steiger, a firefighter friend of mine from east Texas saw my Fourth of July post about the founding father of the volunteer fire service, Benjamin Franklin. Mark MC’s a holiday parade each year. Before the festivities get underway he regales the crowd with some Colonial era useless facts. I know it’s not PIO relevant, but it’s allot of fun to read.
After my appearance last night on Firefighter Netcast, which I thoroughly enjoyed I sat down to recap exactly what my responsibilities are as a PIO. We touched on a number of the areas last night.
I have recently read a number of articles about whether hard copy print materials should be distributed as freely as in the past. The volume of printed materials distributed by public service organizations is massive. Just think about how many department newsletters, brochures, and flyers go out to your community.
The question is if all this paper is really necessary? I think an assessment of your outreach materials is a good start. A summary of some of the tips I have culled are as follows -
