How Staunton’s one-woman PR team conquered local media
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 05:57PM 
Recreation and Parks Departments are struggling to survive – caught somewhere between a needed and wanted service. They aren’t mandated services but (at least in Staunton, Va.) they improve the overall quality of life. When the City of Staunton’s Parks and Recreation Department was forced to layoff their Public Information Officer due to budget cuts, Superintendent Jennifer Jones took over the Department’s public relations with the goal of improving their visibility in newsrooms and online.
Until that point, they had regularly sent bi-weekly press releases to a list of media contacts that included local newspapers, TV and radio stations. One release would include a list of about 20 programs, classes, leagues, special events and trips the department was offering in the upcoming weeks.
“We found these classes and events appearing only in our local newspapers’ calendar sections,” said Jones. “We NEVER received television interviews or newspaper articles.”
Moving to a PR 2.0 model
Jones and the Staunton Parks and Recreation Department took a new approach to news distribution in December 2009. “We signed up with readMedia to get our information onto Google and other search engines,” said Jones. “We were guessing that would become important, and as it stood, we knew our press releases and information only made Google when they were published online by our local newspapers.”
Since December, Staunton Parks and Recreation’s stories have been front page news on two occasions, inspired a full editorial, generated six TV interviews and numerous articles in the second and third pages of their local paper. “This was unheard of before,” said Jones. “In the last few months the amount of attention we have brought to our department via the media is extraordinary. We’ve increased our visibility 10 fold and created awareness of every division in our department. We made stories out of duties and programs we take for granted like the Job Corp program and Christmas Tree recycling (which resulted in a six o’clock TV news spot).”
While some of the television interviews have been about hot button issues in Staunton – ducks in the park and the lowering of golf greens fees, they were surprised to see news stories about the city Horticulturist’s use of environmentally friendly practices and their childhood nutrition lecture series result in television interviews.
Driving awareness, seeing results
“The community has become aware of the quality and quantity of what we do and it has created additional support for our department. Now, instead of releasing lists of upcoming events, we send news about each event individually. We have taken typical every day run of the mill happenings and blown them up into stories – touting their benefits and incentives.”
With this newfound publicity, they noticed a greater public interest in the classes and programs they offer. For example, a class by the former White House Chief Calligrapher and One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure both sold out.
The City of Staunton Parks and Recreation Department is blazing a new trail for local government entities. They’ve created a feed of their online news releases on their Web site and share them across social media platforms. “Thanks to readMedia, we link our press releases to our Web page, Facebook and Twitter. It’s all impressive and way beyond what we could have envisioned or done ourselves. This type of sharing has taken our department way beyond our competitors. Everyone is kind of wondering how we did it.”
This is the first part of a series showcasing how Staunton Park & Recreation gets the word out.
Read Part 2: "5 Secrets to Increasing PR Coverage 10-fold"
Read Part 3: "How Staunton prepares for TV news coverage"
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