Charity Races to Turn 15 Minutes of Fame Into a Long-Term Benefit

On February 2, Dominic Calabrese had the best commute of his life.

Before Mr. Calabrese boarded the train that morning, he stopped off at the newsstand and picked up The Wall Street Journal. As the public-relations director at the Chicago Lighthouse for People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired, he takes more than the usual interest in each day’s headlines. But that day, he was absolutely riveted by what he found on the Journal’s front page: an article about the Chicago Lighthouse.

As part of its myriad services for the visually impaired, the Lighthouse runs a clock-manufacturing operation that employs people with impaired sight. Like many American manufacturers, the operation is facing competition from China, and the Journal covered the struggle in its article.

Mr. Calabrese had known the story was coming, but he didn’t know when — and he didn’t know where in the paper it would appear. “I was flabbergasted and delighted to see the story on the front page,” he says.

For the charity, and for Mr. Calabrese, the story was the return on an investment of time and money — and it was also the beginning of much work ahead to turn a one-shot publicity coup into a sustained campaign that raised the charity’s profile nationally and continues to help improve the group’s finances. ABC’s World News Tonight is planning a segment on Chicago Lighthouse, and a fund-raising gala the organization held last month saw a big increase in attendance.

Laying the Groundwork

For the Chicago Lighthouse, the story behind the Journal article began two years ago, when the group’s trustees decided the organization should start doing its own publicity. The charity knew it was not getting the attention from the news media that its counterparts around the country, such as the Lighthouse International, in New York, and the Braille Institute of America, in Los Angeles, were enjoying, says Rob Cummings, the Chicago Lighthouse’s director of development. A lack of visibility, board members knew, could hurt the charity’s effectiveness.

“It is in service to our mission to be sure that the people who need our services know about us,” says Paula Waters, a trustee who is also a partner at the public-relations firm Fleishman-Hillard, in Chicago. “Increased visibility will also put us in a better position to do fund raising, and to do outreach to the legislative community and to others that have an impact on our future and our fortunes.”

At the behest of the board, Ms. Waters conducted an audit of the charity’s public-relations efforts, and compared the Lighthouse to similar charities in similarly sized cities. What she found, she says, is that “we came in very, very much behind in our public-relations investment, and therefore in our visibility.”

The board decided it was time for a change, and voted to hire three full-time employees to focus on public relations. Last July, Mr. Calabrese, who had previously served as deputy press secretary at the Illinois Department of Human Services, joined the Lighthouse as the organization’s director of public relations.

A Chance Meeting

When Mr. Calabrese joined the Chicago Lighthouse, he continued a part-time job of teaching nonprofit public relations at Columbia College Chicago.

“I spend a lot of time in class talking about the organization, showing sample press releases, and so on,” he says. Last fall, one of his students approached him for more information about the charity. The student was also taking a journalism class, and she thought the Lighthouse would make a good subject for an assignment to find a local story. Mr. Calabrese gave her the information that she needed — “You take every request for information that you get very seriously,” he explains — and thought that was the end of it.

And it might have been, except that his student’s journalism professor happened to be Michael J. McCarthy, the Journal’s deputy bureau chief in Chicago. When the student told him about the Lighthouse and its clock-making operation, he was intrigued.

“I’ve worked in Chicago on and off for 20 years, and I’d never heard of it, and I couldn’t understand why,” he says. He went to the charity’s Web site to check it out further, and called Mr. Calabrese for a chat, still unaware that they shared a student. “Here is an interesting manufacturer in downtown Chicago, hiring blind people. I just thought there was something there,” Mr. McCarthy says.

He made an appointment to visit the plant, and spoke with the plant’s director. “It came out that Asia was posing a real competitive problem, and I thought, OK, now we have a global economic trend, and a new and intriguing twist on what it’s like to market goods internationally,” Mr. McCarthy says. He knew he had a story.

A Champagne Toast

The morning that Mr. McCarthy’s article was published, Mr. Cummings was calling on a donor and soon discovered that the article had appeared on the front page. He hustled back to the office.

In preparation for this moment, Mr. Cummings, who is also Mr. Calabrese’s supervisor, had stashed three bottles of champagne in the office refrigerator. He assembled the entire staff, including the charity’s president, James Kesteloot.

“We got Dom [Calabrese] in there, and we popped a couple of corks of bubbly and we toasted him,” says Mr. Cummings. “We don’t take enough time in this business to say, ‘This is great.’ But to build a strong advancement and development staff, you need to realize that people need to feel appreciated. This was a big career coup for Dom, and by golly, if a guy gets a story on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, we’re going to toast him with champagne.”

At 9 a.m., with the glasses guzzled dry, “we got the coffee going and got everyone to work,” recalls Mr. Cummings. “We had a focused period of time to capitalize on this huge opportunity, and we needed to push hard that day.”

The plan was to turn the Journal article into even more publicity for the Lighthouse. By the time he hit the office that day, Mr. Calabrese had received phone calls from a local radio station and a television station requesting interviews, but the plan was to take this as far as it could go.

And since the story was only going to be in the newspaper for one day, the clock was ticking.

“This Cinderella’s coach is going to turn into a pumpkin at 6 o’clock tonight,” Mr. Cummings told the assembled staff members.

And with that, 10 staff members from the fund-raising and public-relations departments put aside their daily work and pitched in to get the word out about the Journal article. Working from a contact list of local and national news-media outlets that Mr. Calabrese had previously created, employees worked the phones, calling reporters and editors to tell them about the article in the Journal and ask whether they would like to know more about the Chicago Lighthouse.

While some staff members called journalists, others made sure that donors were aware of the article. “We were thinking not just like PR professionals, but development professionals,” says Mr. Cummings. “We went out to buy 25 copies of the paper, and our big donors received individual copies with a note from the president in their mail the next morning.” Major contributors, as well as board members, received phone calls that day as well.

All told, Mr. Cummings estimates that he and colleagues made 200 phone calls that day. Four television crews paid a visit that morning alone. Because everyone worked through lunch, pizza was brought in for sustenance. He says the charity’s workers did not mind the frenetic pace. “It was a very rewarding kind of a day,” says Mr. Calabrese, “the kind of day you live and die for.”

The Power of the Press

The Chicago Lighthouse’s daylong efforts on February 2 paid major dividends. The Journal story prompted articles in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Herald (which covers the local metropolitan area), The Detroit News, and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The Chicago Tribune also is planning to run an article, says Mr. Calabrese. Six local television stations and several local radio stations also covered the story, and ABC World News Tonight spent four hours at the Lighthouse shooting a segment. (The air date has not yet been announced.) “It helped us to reach a new plateau, it positioned us nationally, and that will help us to get more visibility as we move ahead,” says Mr. Calabrese.

It is harder to quantify the results with donors at this point, says Mr. Cummings, but he believes that the publicity has been a boon to fund raising. Five hundred people attended the charity’s April gala, a 48-percent boost from the previous year’s attendance. The event raised more than $360,000.

Demand for the Lighthouse’s clocks also increased — phone calls from McDonald’s and Walgreens closely followed on the heels of the Journal story, says Mr. Calabrese.

The publicity also has been a help when talking with new donors, he says. “Any fund raiser wants to begin the conversation with a donor about some proud thing in the organization. The fact that The Wall Street Journal thinks enough about what we do to put us on the front page is huge for our organization,” he says. The story itself has been a particular help in establishing rapport with potential and current corporate donors, he says, who often face similar challenges with overseas competition: “For us to go into our corporate donors, saying we’re facing the same challenge as you, and can we tell you more about what we do — all of a sudden, you’re coming from the same point of experience as they are.”

The Journal article has also helped the charity reach the general public. The organization has received numerous letters of support, says Mr. Calabrese, including one with a donation from a person in Connecticut. “I know my contribution isn’t much, but it makes me feel good to give it and with all the other worthy charities I support — about 40 — it’s the best I can manage right now,” wrote the new supporter. “I heard about you for the first time in The Wall Street Journal yesterday. I was most impressed and will write my U.S. senators to do what they can to help you out.”

Creating Momentum

The Chicago Lighthouse’s efforts to make the most of a moment in the spotlight holds lessons for other nonprofit organizations, says Mr. Calabrese.

First, he suggests, cultivate personal connections within the news media. By teaching a course at a college with a robust journalism department, he has had opportunities to rub shoulders not only with students who will become tomorrow’s reporters, but also with today’s journalists. “Personal contacts are so important,” says Mr. Calabrese.

When a journalist receives an e-mail message or a phone call from someone they know personally, they are much more likely to pay attention — a bonus for charities with small public-relations budgets. Mr. Calabrese also participates in local news-media activities, such as symposia and forums, as much as possible.

He also urges charity managers to “be informed about what’s going on the world. When you can tie in your story to major world events, major trends, innovative research that’s timely, that gives you an advantage.”

It also helps to have a story that’s not just a typically heart-rending, do-gooder tale.

“Particularly for that middle column of the front page, we’re looking for stories that are intriguing or somehow a little bit offbeat,” says the Journal’s Mr. McCarthy, explaining why the Chicago Lighthouse story became a Page 1 feature. “First of all, taking people inside of how clocks are being made, that’s intriguing in and of itself, since it takes you inside someplace you’ve never been. Then, the impact of having workers that were blind, and the international economic component made it timely. So, it was timely, it was intriguing, it was an oddity, and there was economics.”

Also, Mr. Cummings says, charities shouldn’t get complacent. When a major article about a charity appears, its staff should let the rest of the news media know about it. And don’t forget to notify donors — long after the initial impact fades, donors will still be impressed by the coverage. For donors, “the shelf life of this story will last about a year,” says Mr. Cummings. “When we walk into a donor meeting today, we say, ‘Hey, did you see on February 2 we were on the front page of The Wall Street Journal?’ They say, ‘No, you’re kidding, that’s great!’ They’re thrilled for our good fortune. The more people that hear about it, the better.”

Finally, Mr. Cummings says, keep up a steady effort. The Chicago Lighthouse is preparing for its 100th anniversary celebration next year, and Mr. Calabrese and Mr. Cummings are cooking up a public-relations plan that they hope will make a splash “even bigger than the Journal article,” says Mr. Cummings, who is keeping mum on the details for now. But he will say that there’s still one bottle of champagne chilling in the refrigerator at the Lighthouse: “We’ll open that up when it happens.”