Media Partnership

A media partnership is a collaboration between two organizations (one of them is a media outlet) that can help each other by using promotion and raising visibility & credibility. For a media partnership to coexists, both participants need to gain something from the collaboration, it should be in both their interests.

General Information

A media partnership starts with a sent proposal from an organization (event organiser) to a potential media partner to sponsor a certain event, conference, product launch, competition or a similar event. It is important that media partners are relevant to the event, industry, audience and message. If you find the right media partners, it will bring not only success to the actual event, but it can built trust and become a tradition for future events. We can see the positive results when measuring the effectiveness in the end,.

How do you approach a media partner?

Before contacting the partners and start approaching them towards a media partnership, it is important to make our research.

1. That is the first step: Research media outlets. We make a long list of media partners with all the needed contact information for the event. We segment them by including local, regional and national media channels.

1. Second step: We curate the list and make sure the partners are relevant to the specific of the event. For example, if we organize sports events, we won't contact a music channel.

1. Third step: Contact the list of media partners by phone and send them a mail after the call with all the important information. Both methods can increase the change of signing a contract.

1. Forth step: When you contact them, make sure to ask relevant questions: Another step in the "cleaning" process is asking the right questions to find the best fitting media partners. We want to have a successful event so the questions should help us fulfill our goals. Here are some examples of questions you could ask:

• How many monthly unique visitors do they have?
• What other events they've worked with?
• What other advertisers do they work with?
• How big is their emailing list?
• How many geographic locations do they target? - local, regional or national

1. Fifth step when communicating with the potential partners is describing your needs and the purpose of the event.

1. Sixth step: Offer something in return. Besides the usual stuff such as their logo representation on all promotional materials, and mentioning them during the event, you could find other innovative ways to promote them. Depending on the type of event, you can mention them in a Press Release, offer them a stand, social media promo, email marketing promo and many more.

How do you write a media partnership proposal?

A media partnership proposal should contain all the information described above: - describe the event and the main activity - add a time frame - explain your needs - elaborate the offer - give examples of other previous events - if exist - give examples of other existing media partners - not direct competitor, but something that might spark their desire to be associated with those partners - other relevant information if needed

Online you can get lots of templates for media partnership proposals so you can have support and present all the information in a relevant and natural way.

Relevance to Public Relations

Media partnerships in PR are a way organizations can meet their communications needs.

Media partnerships are worth a lot due to the fact it can take shape into some other forms of promotion compared to the traditional way of support and event promotion. The focus for the organization remains the same as getting media coverage, and both parties should benefit and get added value. It is important that the media partner’s audience overlaps with the target PR audience.

A key responsibility of the PR team in such a media partnership is to assure that the media exposure received is significant enough to merit the in-kind promotional consideration provided.

External Links

5+ Media Partnership Proposal