The manner in which your historic preservation advocacy group communicates—whether it is simply answering a phone call or responding to a disaster — will shape the way your group is perceived by the general public. Your group can boost the impact of its communication efforts by incorporating a "public relations mindset" into its day-to-day activities.

Public relations, or PR, is a catch-all term for all of your group's public communications work. Press relations is a subset of PR work. Your group's relationships with your community and the press are extremely valuable assets that you can leverage to accomplish your mission. Each public relations effort will help you capture more supporters and show your audience how to see preservation in a new way, and in a fresh context.

Make PR a Priority

Despite the importance of community and press relationships, PR work tends to sink to the bottom of most preservationists' priority lists. Preservation groups are usually formed in order to save a significant building, a historic neighborhood, or a cultural or heritage site. Members of preservation groups typically spend their time and money doing things that directly accomplish this goal: fundraising, working with contractors and developers, and organizing educational programs, like tours. Yet one of the key reasons a preservation group may fail is that it does not sufficiently engage the community.

To develop a PR mindset, your preservation group needs to adopt many of the same strategies for developing a relationship with the press into your community relations-building efforts. Your group can't afford to miss chances to gain more influence, public attention, money, and members.

Look for PR Opportunities

If your advocacy group uses press releases as its sole means of generating good PR, you are missing many other PR strategies in your tool box. It is important that your group be constantly looking for opportunities to raise awareness.

You can find these opportunities while you are doing other necessary work, such as building your membership and advocacy network, raising money, and securing grants.

The process of thinking about how your group's work would be interesting and relevant to a larger audience has an added benefit: it will help your group run better by pinpointing problems and identifying opportunities.

Although your preservation group might consider hiring a public relations professional to spread the word about your group's work, there is great value in cultivating good PR skills within your group. After all, nobody knows your story and the value of preservation better than the people in your group. Your group can get started on your PR efforts by creating a public relations plan.

Stay Informed

Effective public relations efforts also require you to keep on top of what's happening in the world around you. By regularly reading reliable mainstream news sources, you will be better prepared to shape your advocacy message within the bigger "news" picture. When you read or hear about any story with a preservation slant, make a note of it. This habit will also help you find preservation-minded journalists and bloggers for your press list.

You'll need to train yourself to read between the lines to find hidden preservation connections. Few preservation news stories have "preservation" in the headline. For instance, a story about an adaptive reuse project in a transitional neighborhood may lead off with a big vision for community revitalization — but the result will be blocks of rehabilitated historic buildings.

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Historic Preservation Advocacy Guide

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