Dooley Communications was busy again this year setting up UNICEF Canada’s annual pumpkin carving contest yesterday at Kildonan Place. We’re pleased to report the event was even more successful than last year by every measure: we have more teams, more media coverage, bigger crowds and more money raised.

Here are a few clippings of the event:

Fish Find Glory as New Pumpkin Kings, Winnipeg Free Press, October 28, 2009

I’m Not Out of My Gourd, Winnipeg Free Press, October 27, 2009

2nd Annual Pumpkin Carving Contest, Chrisd.ca, October 28, 2009

Billie Jo Ross’ blog, Clear 102.3 FM, October 28, 2009

We were also pleased to see CBC TV, Global TV, CTV, CITY TV and SHAW TV all out to cover the event.

Here are a few more photos of the event. 

Glad to see everyone had fun.

This is the third year in a row where September is our time to get busy with UNICEF’s annual Trick-or-Treat campaign.

Every October since 1955, UNICEF Canada has been raising money for children in underdeveloped nations around the world. This year, the campaign might surpass the $100 million milestone. I hope that our PR services here in Manitoba and Saskatchewan will help put them over the top.

Dooley Communications oversees all the media relations for the campaign across the Prairies region. We also do some event management for the campaign and this year will be hosting the second annual Celebrity Pumpkin Carving contest at Kildonan Place on October 27.

Please give generously and support UNICEF’s efforts to raise money to build and outfit schools in Rwanda and Malawi.

www.TrickorTreatforUnicef.ca

It’s Halloween - National UNICEF Day in Canada. As the PR agency for UNICEF’s Prairie Region, we’ve been very busy securing media coverage about this year’s Trick-or-Treat campaign. We’ve run several events this month and fielded interviews across Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Our goal with this kind of campaign is to work creatively with our client and the media to ensure the messages we want are getting across and that the media is getting good stories to cover.

To do that, we staged our first ever celebrity pumpkin carving contest here in Winnipeg. We also organized three simultaneous school events in Regina, Saskatoon and Winnipeg where children ‘walked for water’ to simulate how millions of African children must walk to get their daily drinking water. We were on the phone to radio hosts for the past three weeks and collaborated with  Shaw TV and CityTV’s Breakfast Television to help them produce UNICEF-themed segments.

All in all, we’re very pleased that our ‘earned media’ was way up this year compared to last. We certainly hope that once all the money is counted that the ‘earned fundraising’ is also up this year too.

In addition to the widespread coverage on television and radio, here are a few of the stories we generated in print and online:

Winnipeg Free Press
Pumpkin carving is not for the fainthearted

Winnipeg Sun
Pumpkin Prowess

Regina Leader-Post
Coming together to make Halloween safe
Learning about life in Africa

Saskatoon Star-Phoenix
Walk for Water

If you haven’t donated to UNICEF this year yet, please do so at www.trickortreatforunicef.ca.  The campaign raises money to build and outfit schools in Rwanda and Malawi.

I just came back from the first annual UNICEF Celebrity Pumpkin Carving Contest at Kildonan Place and have to take the time to thank everyone for making it a wonderful success.

Thanks to Kildonan Place, Subway and Maggie’s Pumpkin Patch. And thanks to all our celebrities, including Fred Penner and his son, CTV’s Syliva Kuzyk, Doug Speirs of the Winnipeg Free Press, Dave Angus of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, Clear FM’s Billie Jo and Jay, CBC TV’s John Sauder, Breakfast Television’s Jon Cameron and John Ljungberg, Jolene Bailie of the Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers, and MTC’s Mairi Babb and Peter Mooney, Hot 103’s Steve Adams and Bubba B, QX104’s Mike Alan, Peter Havens of Kildonan Place, and Tom Vaeth of the Winnipeg Goldeyes.

Our Judges’ Choice winner was Fred Penner. Scariest pumpkin went to Breakfast Television. People’s Choice went to Kildonan Place. Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers received Honourable Mention. And Hot 103 was Runner Up.

See our photos here.

We had a lot of fun, raised money for UNICEF’s Schools for Africa programme and put a lot of smiles on faces.

Dooley Communications manages the media relations and public relations efforts for UNICEF Canada’s Prairies Region, which overs all of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. We’ve run a number of events this October as part of the annual Trick-or-Treat campaign.  Our communications goals have been to support UNICEF’s mission of educating people about the needs of children around the world as well as to help them raise money to meet those needs. We’ve done that through publicity events, news releases, media advisories, social media (such as Facebook) and event management.

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.