Event Report: Strategic Communications for Advocacy

        On Tuesday, I attended an event at the Washington College of Law called “Strategic Communications for Advocacy.”

The discussion panel featured Fernanda Katz Eilenberg and Cate Urban. Eilenberg was the former Senior Advocacy Officer for the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center and Urban is currently serving as the Communications Manager for WEConnect International. Both organizations work closely together to address human rights concerns overseas, and in their discussion, both Eilenberg and Urban explicitly talked about their work in Uganda and Zimbabwe. The discussion panel was part of a series put on by the Washington College of Law to give students the skills they need to work in the field of human rights and public interest. The panel provided an interesting look at the tools used to relate human interest causes and problems overseas, including press releases, social media, and opinion editorials, and how this landscape has changed over the years in which they were both involved with the RFK Center, as well as how it will continue to develop.

The panel began with Eilenberg and Urban discussing the ways in which public relations and communications practitioners are able to use the tools available to them to most effectively reach their publics. Eilenberg and Urban presented copies of two press releases from 2012 to the audience, focused on issues of human rights violations in both Uganda and Zimbabwe. They spent the majority of this part of the discussion talking about press releases, which, to many others in this field, often seem like a dying trade, especially with the growing prevalence of tools such as social media releases. However, Eilenberg and Urban argued that this is not the case and that traditional press releases are still an incredibly useful tool for reaching target audiences and keeping issues relevant, especially in the world of human rights protection.

The panelists also presented tips for writing successful press releases, such as identifying the purpose of the press release before writing it (asking questions such as, who is our audience? What are we trying to communicate? How can we best reach them?), eliminating jargon but also using terms and phrases that are easily and well-understood by their target audiences, using short titles that are also effective in grabbing, and holding the readers’ attention, and ending the press release with a call to action that motivates readers to stay engaged and act on the organization’s behalf. I found all these tips very useful, and they also very much aligned with what I have learned in my writing for communication and public relations courses that I have taken at American University thus far. 

The panelists also briefly discussed the importance of tools such as opinion editorials, which can often be an overlooked tool of public relations. Eilenberg specifically noted that op-eds are incredibly useful, although not necessarily at the time they are published, but later as an organization continues to reach out to other media outlets. Being able to say that your organization had an op-ed published on The Huffington Post is a great stepping stone to being mentioned in larger publications, like The New York Times. Little pieces like op-eds can quickly build up into something much larger. Some other tips that the panelists provided were warnings that “you’re going to get a lot of no’s” when reaching out to media outlets and to get used to people not responding to your e-mails or phone calls, but also to stay optimistic throughout the process. 

        I found this panel very interesting and I am glad I was able to attend this one. I am interested in non-profit work, so the panelists’ experience with the RFK Human Rights Center was very much aligned with my own interests. It was also interesting to hear their thoughts on the changing landscape of public relations, especially with traditional press releases, and I was glad to hear that they do not think that press releases are a dying trend. While I found that their discussion was more focused on tips for being in this field rather than the work they did at the RFK Human Rights Center, it was still interesting to hear their presentation, knowing the experience they both had in the field of grassroots human rights advocacy.