Our Rookie Year in PR: Tackling 3 Real Challenges
Did you know that HOPE Japan has a PR team?
When we think of PR (public relations) many people may imagine specialized and professional work such as the dissemination of information and dealing with the media. However, our PR team at HOPE began with two people who had no such experience. Having been with HOPE for many years (doing lots of other things), the PR team was put together with a couple of new part-timers.
It has been one year since we founded this team in April 2024.
Looking back, we were confused by everything we were doing for the first time, but we pushed on to overcome the challenges and went through a series of trials and errors. We are a small team that has just started its journey, but we would like to share a little bit about our journey over the past year and our vision for the future.
What are NPO Public Relations?
As public relations novices, our image of public relations was that of a typical corporate PR firm, where we would promote products and respond to press coverage. However, we had no product to promote and rarely received interviews. What is a PR person supposed to do? I was left wondering, “What does a PR person do?" First, we learned the basics of "what PR is" from seminars and books, and established two main objectives of PR that HOPE needed to achieve.
Purpose of Public Relations
- To inform supporters of HOPE's activities in an easy-to-understand manner, build relationships of trust, and encourage action.
- To enhance the sense of unity of the organization by establishing a system for sharing information among staff members.
Supporters come from a variety of backgrounds, including business people, people who have known us for a long time, and people who have recently become interested in our organization for the first time. In order to convey information in an easy-to-understand manner that suits each individual and at the right time to deepen relationships of trust, we clarified the role of information dissemination tools from the perspective of “what to convey to whom and what to convey.
Our Work in 2024
① Proactive use of Social Media
First, we focused on using social media (SNS) to transmit information in a timely manner. HOPE uses Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but we didn’t clearly understand the differences between these platforms, and the timing of our posts was inconsistent.
So, we analyzed the trends of our followers and observed the accounts of other NPOs, and made some changes such as posting information in English on Facebook and Japanese on Instagram. We also focused on creating content that conveys the personality of our organization by introducing our staff and volunteers. We are continuing to work on this, even though it continues to be a daily challenge!
On the other hand, none of our PR staff had any experience using LinkedIn, and this network still proves to be challenging. We are still studying this medium and we hope to post information regularly within this year!
When we recruited our new SNS volunteers, we received applications from within and beyond our own prefecture, and even from abroad. It was a pleasant surprise to have new staff with diverse perspectives join us.
② Press Releases
A press release is a tool for disseminating information about an organization to the public through media such as newspapers, broadcasting stations, and online news sites. Unlike posting information on social media, we used this tool with great care to share information about our events and charity dinners, since our audience were media professionals.
As part of restarting the charity dinners, we shared an article explaining its uniqueness, appeal, and purpose, which helped us raise awareness of HOPE's work through online news sites and reach people who were unfamiliar about us.
PR TIMES: Read the story of the charity dinner (Japanese only)
③ Improving our Annual Report
The Annual Report, which is sent by post to our regular donors every December, is an important document that summarizes HOPE's activities over the past year and conveys our gratitude to our supporters. Until now, we have stuck with the same format, but the editing staff felt that it was becoming stale, so we had a discussion on its redesign. This is one of our initiatives to strengthen our organizational foundation that we wrote about in a previous blog. We have added a new page that describes our Mission, Vision, and Values that are the foundations of our work and community, and included a list of the businesses and organizations that have supported us over the past year, the awards we have received that were reported in the media, our achievements in Japan, and the people who have worked with us.
View the latest annual report:
2023-2024
Goals for 2025
HOPE's information sharing tools are not limited to the three mentioned above! We also have a monthly newsletter and a website that includes details about our organization.
However, even though we have been sending out our newsletter since 2015, there are still some donors who are unaware of its existence. We have reflected on our past actions and concluded that we could have done better to raise awareness about our work. We will continue to think of ways to increase our number of donors in the future!
If you have any ideas, please reach out by email or DM us on SNS!
It has also been more than five years since we last updated our website. So, we are going to redesign our homepage and will aim to make it easier for everyone to navigate and access information. (This is a major project that we are currently working on).
The purpose of PR is to disseminate information about the organization and gain the trust of our supporters.
In order to deliver reliable information and increase the number of supporters, we will also be running a campaign to recruit regular donors from June 3rd!
If you can, please support us! The campaign page can be found here
We are still in the midst of trials and errors. The more we learn, the better we will get at tackling the challenges. We hope you will look forward to seeing the variety of information that we will share with you in the future!
HOPE's activities are supported by your donations.
CATEGORIES
UPCOMING EVENTS
17th Annual Kansai HOPE Dinner - Kobe
20th Annual "An Evening of HOPE" - Tokyo
Osaka Marathon 2025
