The year is getting off to a great start for everyone at Dooley Communications with new clients coming on stream (stay tuned for more info) and old clients coming back with new projects.

It’s exciting to see the firm continue to grow. As we do, we’ll maintain our focus on being a service-oriented PR firm for the Canadian Prairies. Our focus remains on the Winnipeg and Manitoba markets for public relations and corporate communications services, but we also routinely reach into both Northwestern Ontario and Saskatchewan for our clients.

We use a variety of tools and tactics for our clients from traditional media relations to corporate communications, newsletters, magazines, social networks and blogs. We also develop and execute advertising campaigns, stage special events, and host photo ops and public speaking engagements.

As we get started on our third full calendar year in business, I’d like to personally thank all our suppliers for their highly professional and excellent help. They include:

• Twist Design and Communications
• Nova Design
• Prairie Research Associates
• GRP Media Services
• Mirek Photography
• Tony Nardella Photography
• Tint Marketing
• Contemporary Printing
• Marketwire LP
• Cision
• The Great Promotional Products Company

All the best in 2010!

Adam Dooley,
President

Dooley Communications is pleased to be celebrating its second full year in business this summer, offering senior level public relations and corporate communications services. From our base in Winnipeg, Manitoba, our firm now serves clients from across Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

We have organized small and large media events for clients and created entire public relations strategies for others. We regularly conduct media training seminars, and counsel organizations through the minefields of issues management and crisis communications. We’ve helped write and produce annual reports, newsletters, brochures and websites, and we’ve written countless blogs and advised on the best use of social media.

It continues to be a fun, exciting challenge as we build a service-oriented public relations firm here in the Canadian Prairies.

So thank you to all our clients. We look forward to serving and growing with you in the future.

So the government has screwed you over. Your frustration is palpable. It rises to the surface as soon as anyone mentions the name of a certain minister or a bureaucrat. You can’t resist taking a shot at them every opportunity you get. But as the old saying goes: if you get into a pissing match with a skunk, you might win, but you’ll both end up smelling badly.

I spend a lot of my time advising clients about what and what not to say in public about a wide variety of issues. But media training and effective media relations is as much about how you say things too.

It is rarely (if ever) a good strategy to get into a highly charged, public confrontation. Our job is to influence the opinions, perceptions and behaviour of targeted audiences. We can’t do that job effectively if we appear to be irrational, angry or bitter. On the contrary, if you’re in a public battle, we want to show through our public utterances that we are more credible than our opposition. We’re the opinion leaders. We deserve our audiences’ respect and attention.

As is almost always the case with good corporate communications and public relations, it comes down to this: remember your audience!

That is just one of the important lessons we cover in our media training sessions. Dooley Communications has led media training for a wide variety of organizations in Winnipeg, Manitoba and across Canada, helping front line employees to executives better handle the pressures of representing their organizations in public.

Media relations is almost always a crap shoot - especially if you’re pitching soft news. You never know what kind of news day you’ll be up against and sometimes newsrooms can be unpredictable as to what they want to cover.

As a former reporter, I know the first step is to try to pitch a story to the media that’s relevant to their audiences and find something that works in their media. Make sure you have a visual story to tell for television. Make sure you have details and context as well as a good photo op for print. Radio thrives on being instantaneous and requires a good speaker who can break complex ideas down to sound bites. Online media (see all of the above) thrives on immediacy.

Media relations (and media training) is an important part of what we do at Dooley Communications. Right now, we’re doing a lot of work in this regard for UNICEF Canada. Last month, we helped them with publicity around a special meeting on the sexual exploitation of children in Winnipeg. This month, we’re working on the annual Trick or Treat campaign.We have an entire month of events and activities planned and high hopes of earning some positive media attention.

Sometimes being good at media relations means being nimble. Yesterday was a case in point. We heard that one of our UNICEF schools in Regina was holding an assembly today featuring a popular local Canadian Idol contestant. We quickly put together a media advisory and made sure it made it into the right hands of the major media outlets in Regina. This morning, we were pleased to see reporters from two television stations and the major daily paper out to cover the event. I’ll post the links later.

UNICEF has been a big part of Halloween in Canada for generations, and Dooley Communications is pleased to be helping the Prairies Region office publicize the annual Trick or Treat campaign throughout October.

It’s a busy time as we gear up our efforts to spread the word about the campaign that educates thousands of children across the country about what life is like on the other side of the world. There is also a fundraising element that collects money for UNICEF’s Schools for Africa program, which builds schools in Rwanda and Malawi.

Dooley Communications is managing UNICEF’s public relations efforts for all of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. That includes arranging for regular media advisories, news releases and managing several events in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Regina. In addition to our regular launch event, this year, we’re planning our first ever Celebrity Pumpkin Carving Contest late in the month at Kildonan Place.

We will also be hosting Walk for Water events on October 23 in all three cities where children will get a first hand sense of what is like to have to walk some distance for daily drinking water. It will be a learning experience for the kids and we hope it will generate some exposure for a very worthwhile campaign.

This is the second year that Dooley Communications has handled the public relations for UNICEF Canada’s Prairies Region. We’re proud to be associated with an organization so well known for its work around the world in helping children at risk. We handle media relations, give media training to speakers, manage events and provide general strategic direction for the local campaign.

Check it out - and donate today - at www.trickortreatforunicef.ca.