How do you act when your organization is facing a crisis? How do you relate to the media? How do you develop a strategy and act as a team? PR-specialists of civil society organisations dealing with IDP issues have been reassembled to continue their training within the “Regional Eye: Strengthening Conflict Sensitive Coverage in Ukraine’s Regional Media” EU-funded project. Most of the training course is devoted to crisis communications.
Regional Eye: Strengthening Conflict Sensitive Coverage in Ukraine’s Regional Media is an EU funded initiative, implemented by a media Consortium of five organizations: Thomson Foundation, Institute of Regional Media and Information (IRMI), MEMO 98, The European Journalism Center and Association Spilnyi Prostir (ASP).
Mark Webster (Thomson Foundation) and Yelena Barannik (IRMI) are offering the participants a variety of practical tasks. As, for example, presentation techniques. It may seem that it is not a problem to introduce yourself. How do you make your message informative and captivating? How do you get the person you are talking to or the audience interested? As it turned out, there are lots of new things out there for the participants.
Within four training days the participants are going to visit Kharkiv Crisis Center, work in the press office of the Main Directorate of the New Police in Kharkiv Region, where they are going to record their interviews with further discussion. There will be crisis communication scenarios when true-to-life situations are modelled and will need to be addressed by the trainees, followed by analysis, feedback and coming up with effective solutions.
Yevhen Shlyakhtin, “Impact Hub Odessa” CSO:
– This workshop is highly practical. We work on camera and learn how to work with the media. I was supposed to present my project in-between the two trainings of the course and trainers’ advice came very handy. However, I have arrived at the second training with a question in store. How do you talk in an interview to avoid it being badly cut in the editing? There are issues that need to be clarified, as to writing up a press-release, in particular. I would like to elaborate more on interview techniques, working on camera: I did not quite like my first try, so I feel a need to do my work at mistakes.
Viktoriia Stasovska, Unified Center for IDP Assistance, Myrhorod:
– Press release writing skills are of particular value for me and doing interviews. This is practice I will not get at my home city. I would like to reinforce those skills. The presentation of my organization went well, though my colleagues at work helped me to prepare.
On the first day the public information officers had a chance to talk to local journalists that were part of Regional Eye project. The discussion was about the interest both parties have towards each other. Tatiana Tokmylenko of AkCentre announced the events her organization was going to organize in the near future and offered the media interesting bits of news. The journalists shared both negative and positive experiences of cooperating with NGO, spoke about thematic programmes and what is news. They also prompted the ways of improving the productivity in cooperation between CSOs and the media.
Anna Sokolova, a freelance journalist, “MediaPort” news agency:
– Contacts with CSOs bring in new topics and new heroes. We are feeling the lack of those these days. For that reason, I would be happy to hear the ideas of CSO representatives on what might be interesting IDP content.
The preparation of next courses is underway. You are welcome to apply!
Four trainings, joined together in pairs, are going to take place on April 5-8 and May 17-20 in Odessa and on April 11-14 and May 23-25 in Lviv. To participate send a short letter of motivation letter at IRMI’s address. Deadline for applications is March 31, Thurday.
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