Following up from the recent surgery conducted by Third Sector Media we would like to share some of the topics discussed. Firstly we explored the ins and outs of sending unsolicited HTML emails. These are the ones that arrive in your inbox with images and text embedded in the email itself.

Our primary concern is with the legality of sending unsolicited html emails. These would count as SPAM and so would fall foul of new European Parliament legislation spearheaded by The European Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. The rules state that “Commercial Email in European Economic Area will not be allowed without recipients’ prior consent”.

The way forward is to compose a driver email encouraging the reader to seek more information and interaction from a splash page. We have outlined this as a real life case study here. http://thirdsectormedia.com/emsse-e-flyer

We spent some time talking about press releases and who to send them to, how frequently and how to present them. We suggested that unless an individual has an existing relationship with a particular journalist then releases should be sent to a publication’s news editor who will assign a journalist to the story accordingly. Frequency of releases entirely depends on the organisation and their ability to divert resource to not only writing the release but being available for follow up questions.

A second tip with press releases is to write them in the style of the target publication. The releases that are written for the Nottingham Evening Post, for example, are always focused on people as the newspaper in particularly interested in publishing human interest stories. We demonstrated how we would approach press releasing by showing the Partnership Council’s press release section of their website. http://www.partnershipcouncil.co.uk/index.php?/press-releases/  As a very busy local charity the Partnership Council are issuing about four press releases a month.

Other topics included independent reviews of existing websites, annual reports and newsletters. We also spend half an hour with one person discussing how to target communication to encourage student volunteering.

The feed back we have received from the surgery was all positive we are pleased to report. Third Sector Media are definitely going to be running a second surgery in the new year, watch this space for details.