Tips on how to land a public relations job for a nonprofit organization.

Q. I am a recent college graduate looking to get into a public-relations job at a nonprofit organization. How can I get the experience I need to make employers take a chance on me?

A. When seeking entry into the nonprofit job market, volunteering is nearly always the first step. After all, the surest way to prove your commitment to a specific charity or to nonprofit work in general is to offer your talents and time on an unpaid basis.

But John G. Paré Jr., director of public relations at the National Federation of the Blind, in Baltimore, makes an important point about why volunteering is so crucial. “For a nonprofit, and this may be the same for a for-profit company, the biggest thing is that our employees must thoroughly understand the mission and what we do,” he says. At his charity, for example, “we have to spend quite a bit of time training people about blindness, a subject most people don’t know very well.” Volunteering, he says, provides deep and specific knowledge about an organization and the work it does.

Internships can give you a career boost, but many are unpaid – and you might not be able, as a recent college graduate, to afford to take a full-time unpaid position. A paying job in a for-profit public-relations firm or the publicity department of a corporation will teach you the required skills in writing, crafting brochures and other publications, and planning publicity campaigns, and you can apply your skills to a charitable cause in your off hours, or participate in any pro bono charity projects in which your company engages.

And don’t forget that traditional public-relations jobs are not the only route to gaining communications skills. For example, while journalists and public-relations representatives sometimes take an adversarial view of each other out in the working world, their respective skills are complementary.

Kara Bussabarger, media-relations manager for the Louisville Zoo Foundation, in Kentucky, orignally worked as a reporter. Today, her early journalistic training still comes in handy as she connects with journalists who might help publicize the zoo’s efforts, and prepares zoo staff members for interviews. But she also spent time volunteering for the zookeepers both before and after she was hired at the zoo.

“In PR, especially in nonprofits, you have to have a passion for the mission,” she says. “If you haven’t experienced it yourself, it’s hard to get the message and the passion across. It helps enormously that I have my own stories to tell about when the gorillas did this or that, and that I’ve been out in the field getting dirty.”

These experiences, she says, have also helped her build trust with zoo employees. “I can’t do my job without these other people – I need them to be able to tell the story about the zoo’s mission,” she says. If you’re willing to muck around in the animal pens among them, she says, “they have another level of respect for you.”