The Editor’s Post: This is why the media is not covering your impact organisation’s work
Media advice for impact startups, AI's fragile balance between good and bad and breaking barriers for impact VC. This week’s view from the Pioneers Post newsroom.
Impact entrepreneurs: this is why the media is not covering your organisation’s work.
This week I took part in a ‘media mentor session’ with this year’s cohort of the 100x Impact Accelerator based at the London School of Economics. Sitting (virtually) alongside six other journalists from around the world (including representatives of The Guardian, Sifted and The Indian Express), we had been asked to share some insights to help the impact entrepreneurs pitch their stories to publications and secure coverage of their work.
I fear that we may have left many of them feeling that it’s an impossible task.
We described the pressures that journalists face every day: the hundreds of irrelevant emails we receive, the audience ‘attention crisis’, the declining revenues, the increasing pressures on ever more cut-back teams – all of which mean that it’s becoming more difficult for story ideas to even get considered, let alone covered. One of the mentees said: “It sounds brutal.” It is.
The 100x Impact Accelerator participants are some of the most exciting social venture founders in action at the moment: they were chosen for the programme because they’ve got sound projects, they make positive change and they’ve got big ambitions – it’s hoped that many of them will become ‘social unicorns’. Yet, they told us during the session, they were struggling to connect with journalists, and to get stories in the media.
We gave them some tips: send concise emails highlighting why your story is important or different (cut out the introductory banter at the start); seek a timely angle; be able to demonstrate your impact through facts and figures; have people ready who can talk about how your work has affected them; don’t use AI to communicate, etc.
My personal top tip is to be honest: don’t try to pretend to be something you’re not, don’t get a fancy PR company to spin your story so far that it doesn’t resemble the real thing, admit where you’ve stumbled and be able to explain how you got back up again.
The fact remains though that there are many more great stories, interviewees and op-ed contributors than there are journalists and publications to process them. No matter how amazing your venture, you may not ever get it featured on your national TV channel, in the country’s biggest publication or even on your local radio station.
But does it matter?
Entrepreneurs’ communication strategies often include ambitious media coverage goals. But often they forget to first think about why they want that coverage. Will it help them meet their impact aims? How does it fit into their business plan and their theory of change? These are the most important things.
And, if after considering all this, you’d still like to pitch a story to us at Pioneers Post, we’d be delighted for you to get in touch. Just please read our submission guidelines first!
This week's top stories:
Finding the AI balance: how to use AI for good without trashing the planet and its people
How to unlock VCs’ full impact potential
Our freshly updated listing of social enterprise and impact investing events in 2025
Top picture credit: European Council, Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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