How to get major broadcast stations talking positively about your home

As a care home, you’ll have a wealth of life experience amongst your residents.
 
And this is something that’s great to call upon for PR purposes if you’re looking to spread awareness of your care offering.
 
However, it’s all well and good having that experience – but you usually need a news hook to make it work for press…
 
Here’s a quick example as to how we went about using Valentine’s Day to get local newspaper coverage and an appearance on Radio 4’s Sunday morning news show.
 
Our client, Wellbeing Care has several homes and one of them, The Dell, has some lovely residents with interesting life stories between them.
 
So, we worked with the team there to form a ‘panel’ of agony aunts and uncles, to answer the public’s relationship queries.
 
The three residents – Malcolm, Elizabeth and Joan – have very different relationship backgrounds, which makes them a fountain of knowledge across all sorts of quandaries and dilemmas. 
 
Putting the call out for submissions then, we saw some great interest from the home’s local press, with the story covered by the Eastern Daily Press, the Lowestoft Journal, Suffolk News and the East Anglian Times – as well as care trade press, like The Carer.

But the cream of the crop was a 10-minute segment on Radio 4’s weekend morning news show.
 
Presented by Paddy O’Connell, it saw BBC radio journalists visit the home to speak to residents directly, posing the first relationship query to them as part of that segment.
 
The coverage has subsequently seen the relationship advice requests rolling in, with the BBC team now looking to revisit the home to carry out a follow up piece, with a view to it appearing across television, radio and BBC News Online.
 
It’s a prime example then, of a lovely little initiative with a touch of creative thoughts that’s generated some great press interest.

Want us to do something similar for you?
 
Just get in touch – we’d love to help.