Iowa State Fair gets a blue ribbon for PR

When’s the last time you wrote a press release about yodeling? Or cooking with lard? What about checkers or cross-stitching? For Megan Grandgeorge, making news about these topics is a typical part of her job as marketing and tourism manager for the Iowa State Fair. And Megan and her team not only send news releases about interesting and sometimes obscure topics to drum up support for the Fair, they send lots of them. Hundreds. The PR team at the Iowa State Fair sent out more than 500 press releases last year – and 450 of those went out during the Fair’s 11-day run in August.

The Iowa State Fair attracts more than 1 million visitors each year, making it the fifth largest state fair in the country. That’s no small feat for a relatively small state like Iowa. Megan and her team have found that sending press releases about individual people involved with specific elements of the Fair – winners of talent competitions, food contests, livestock shows – generates a lot of interest and coverage among local media outlets.

“Reporters really want our information,” Megan said. “The media needs local news content, and they love it when we showcase winners.” The Fair attracts people from across the state (and many from out of state) and awards prizes to approximately 45,000 contestants every year. Megan’s team goes out of its way to acknowledge the winners and generate press coverage for them. They recognize that news publications are very interested in news happening in their own backyards about local residents.

So how do they pull it off?

Writing and sending hundreds of hyperlocal press releases about contest winners to thousands of local media outlets takes a lot of stamina. The Iowa State Fair has a team of six people who write and edit press releases during the Fair, and they use readMedia’s Newsmaker platform to distribute them to relevant media and get the news posted online and into Google News. “We have it down to a science,” said Megan. “We’re pretty much an assembly line.”

With so much of Iowa’s economy linked to agriculture (92 percent of residents are somehow connected to the industry), the stories from the Iowa State Fair resonate with local audiences and provide a great opportunity to showcase people and activities happening at the Fair. Whether it’s livestock breeding, horticulture contests, the popular Bill Riley talent competition or the State Fair Games, the public relations team at the Iowa State Fair knows that creating news stories about people and linking them to their hometown media outlets pays off. “It’s totally worth it,” Megan said.

Keeping the buzz going

During the offseason, the Iowa State Fair issues press releases about what’s coming up at the following year’s fair – what musical acts will be playing and what contests are scheduled. They also publicize news about the Fair organization itself, like when new members are elected to the Iowa State Fair Board or when the Fair wins recognition for its success. All of the news releases are housed in the Iowa State Fair’s online newsroom.

The average readMedia client sends about 33 press releases each year. While it doesn’t make sense for every organization to issue 500 news stories, it’s a strategy that has paid dividends for the Iowa State Fair. Pumping out so much news content works for the Fair because they localize and personalize it. “We’ve had an incredible amount of success in our local media,” said Megan. “Reporters often want more than we give them. They contact us for photos of events or contest winners and really give our photographers a workout.”