Tips for Getting a Charity’s Views Into a Newspaper’s Editorial Pages

Times have changed at the Polly Klaas Foundation. This spring, the Petaluma, Calif., organization devoted to child-protection matters expanded a national campaign to promote the successful passage of Congressional financing for a federal “Amber Alert” missing-child warning system.

But that advocacy took a new form for the 10-year-old organization. Guided by a public-relations organization, the group got an opinion article about the Amber Alert bill published in the editorial page of USA Today. Additionally, the group’s executive director took on The New York Times by writing a rebuttal letter, which the paper published, to a Times editorial urging caution on the bill.

While the Polly Klaas Foundation may be new to the experience of writing letters and filing op-ed pieces, as signed opinion articles are called, other charities have for many years used such writings to reach potential supporters.

“It’s almost part of the job description,” says Sherry Frank, executive director of the Atlanta chapter of the American Jewish Committee. “Anyone involved in community relations, anyone in the nonprofit world, has to work with the media to get their story and perspective out.”

Newspaper editors say they welcome the contributions of nonprofit organizations to their opinion and letters pages because they help broaden the section’s collection of voices. Occasionally, some of those organizations are even able to provide information that expands a paper’s coverage beyond its editorial resources.

But that does not mean that any submission from a charity will be met with open arms. Editors are often — by their own admission — an overworked, grumpy bunch, and erect their own particular barriers to organizations and individuals who seek news-media exposure. Nevertheless, the opinion pages are often referred to as “the people’s pages,” and editors recognize the presence that many nonprofit organizations have in their communities.

Newspaper editors and charity leaders who have successfully placed letters and opinion pieces in their local papers have strong views about the best ways for nonprofit organizations to get their submissions published, and the kinds of writing that best suit the task. Although following their tips won’t guarantee success for charities seeing news-media exposure, it can improve their chances.

Do’s and Don’ts

Every editor has two words of advice for charities that send letters and opinion articles to newspapers: Don’t beg.

“I’ve seen well-written, often interesting pieces from nonprofits,” says John Taylor, editorial-page editor of The News-Journal, in Wilmington, Del., and president of the National Conference of Editorial Writers. “The ones that are successful getting past my gate and appealing to readers are the ones that call attention to things that are important to people. But the one thing that turns me and everyone else off is the begging op-ed.”

The reasons that newspapers are disinclined to publish nonprofit submissions asking for money are twofold, says Barry Lank, the editorial-page editor of the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J.: “One, I feel like I’m publishing a press release, and I don’t like to do that, and the other is that everyone is looking for money right now. If you publish for one group, why won’t you publish for another? I don’t know about other editors, but I don’t want to be put in that position.”

But if the writer can avoid begging, the editorial pages provide a high-profile opportunity for a nonprofit organization to get its message out, one that can even transcend being the subject of a news article, says Elizabeth Hitchcock, communications director at U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a national advocacy group for a network of statewide grass-roots organizations. “If you give an interview to a reporter, they’re seeing it through their lens,” says Ms. Hitchcock. “If I send a letter to the editor, if I write an op-ed, generally, it’s going to be in my words.” If a story has already been written, an opinion piece allows a charity to raise an issue that wasn’t raised in the article, or submit a view of the subject that wasn’t previously addressed, she adds.

Editors look for that extra opinion when they decide which articles or letters to run, according to David Holwerk, editorial-page editor of The Sacramento Bee. “One of the things we’ll run is if it’s responding to something we’ve written,” he says. “Or a piece that takes real and persuasive exception to something that we have published.”

Christopher Stone, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, in New York, which works to improve legal and public-safety institutions, notes that the mission of many nonprofit organizations is to produce research and analysis. They can draw attention to their findings through an opinion piece, he says.

“For organizations like ours that focus on quality research rather than broad public-policy campaigns, the danger is you put all the energy into producing the research and little into disseminating it, to drawing attention to the intense amount of information that is being generated,” says Mr. Stone, who recently wrote an opinion article for the Los Angeles Times on the California bail system that referred to work Vera has done. “More work needs to be put into disseminating the results of this intense research. Letters and op-eds should be part of that work.”

For Physicians for Human Rights, a Boston organization that publicizes international human-rights violations, the opinion pages are a way of fulfilling the group’s mission. “As a human-rights organization, we’re in the information, documentation, and exposure business,” says Susannah Sirkin, the group’s deputy director. “It’s almost like we’re reporters.”

As a result, the charity files newspaper pieces with great regularity, Ms. Sirkin says: “In a good month, maybe one or two a month, maybe more.” With war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the issues those conflicts raise, she says, the group has been submitting up to 12 per month.

What to Send

While editorial-page editors are usually willing to read and consider many types of submissions, they all lack two things: the time to read and the space to put everything they receive. Therefore, short, interesting pieces are essential.

“The shorter the better,” Mr. Holwerk says. “Five hundred words is better than 600, and 600 is better than 700. One of the problems with everything we get is that they’re just too long.”

For letters, editors suggest you read the paper’s guidelines — which often run at the bottom of the letters page every day — before submitting anything. Few letters to the editor ever exceed 250 words.

“If you just write a letter that’s the right length, you’ve gotten past most of the competition,” Mr. Lank says. “We get tons of letters that are too long. Those are the first ones we get rid of.”

With such a short amount of space for a letter, it is important to be simple and clear.

“I always tell people to make a sandwich with their material,” Ms. Hitchcock says. “Put your main point up front, put your supporting facts in the middle, and restate the main point at the end. In practical reality, an awful lot of people will read the first and last paragraphs and miss what’s in the middle. If people are going to remember nothing else, I want them to remember that main message.”

Letter writers should highlight their connection to the issue they are writing about, says Mr. Holwerk — whether they have a stake in the issue they’re writing about, or if their organization is considered an expert in the field of concern.

Be newsy, Ms. Sirkin says. “You have to be specific in your examples,” she says. “Have some detail that’s not widely known or reported. And you have to have a crisp policy viewpoint, and make sure those viewpoints are backed up.” And watch the tone of the letter, she adds. “A lot of opinion pieces from the nonprofit world get rejected if they’re too shrill,” she says. “So you have to be reasonable, and not use language that takes an exclamation mark. The same goes for underlined words and capital letters. You don’t want to come off as a wacko.”

But don’t be too technical either, Mr. Lank advises. “When we get letters and press releases from nonprofits and other bureaucracies, they read like they were written by either lawyers or grant writers,” he says. “No one wants to read that. Not even other lawyers or grant writers. The question you have to ask is, would you want to read it if you weren’t writing it?”

Some charity leaders suggest pairing an issue up with a person or organization who is well known to the paper or is identified with the issue. Ms. Frank will often write a letter or editorial and have a prominent board member co-sign it, while Ms. Hitchcock tries to present her submissions as the work of a coalition.

“It’s important to have as many voices telling the story as possible,” Ms. Hitchcock says. “If you can let someone know it’s not just an issue important to environmentalists, but the faith communities are interested too, it helps a great deal.”

Working With Contacts

Ms. Sirkin credits some of her success in getting her opinion pieces into print to the relationships she has established with editors at a variety of newspapers. Editors believe these acquaintanceships are very important, particularly at higher-circulation publications, which tend to have more bureaucratic layers.

If an organization has already been featured in a newspaper’s stories, it should try to use the contacts it developed during the reporting of those articles when it tries to place an opinion piece, editors say. “In general, we try to work with editors we know,” Mr. Stone says. “We talk to a lot of editors and journalists on background all of the time for their stories. We’ll often go back to them and say, ‘There’s this story here, and we think we could put a short op-ed together.’”

Ms. Hitchcock picks her targets carefully, trying to identify editorial writers who cover certain “beats” when she wants to send in an opinion piece to a larger paper.

An important part of building those relationships is determining how editors want to be contacted, say editors and charity leaders. Ask editors their preferences — some do not answer the phone, while others ignore e-mail messages from all but their most trusted information sources. On the other hand, sending a piece via e-mail to editors at smaller papers can be a big help, as they do not have to assign someone from what is usually a limited staff to retype it, says Kay Semion, the associate editorial page editor of The Daytona Beach News-Journal, in Florida.

One thing, Mr. Holwerk says, never works: missives that include the taunt “I dare you to publish this.” They wind up in his wastebasket.

Got tips for getting opinion pieces and letters to the editor into print? Tell your nonprofit peers in the Share Your Brainstorms online forums.