A selection of coverage of the Naked Truth Project study (image: Jersey Road PR)
Raising awareness of important but often less-known stories to a wide audience is the jet-fuel powering the whole team working at Jersey Road.
That is why we are celebrating this week. Visible Ministries and its flagship initiative the Naked Truth Project appeared centre stage on Sky TV’s breakfast news and Sky News online with a top story at the weekend. In December last year, Visible Ministries won Jersey Road’s 10th anniversary Big Birthday Giveaway, awarded a year of free PR support.
The charity commissioned new research, which found that more than half of UK adults would be concerned if a family member was involved in online pornography, and 13 per cent of those were addicted to pornography. This and further revealing data comes amid wider controversy about access and regulations to porn websites.
The story was also featured by a host of other outlets including the Sunday Mirror, People Magazine, Capital FM, Daily Star.co.uk, Heart FM, Smooth Radio and BBC Radio London. Nearly 50 pieces of media coverage and in total up to nine hundred thousand audience views will add to Naked Truth’s growing voice in tackling one of the UK’s greatest societal issues – compulsive pornography use.
The coverage comes ahead of the Naked Truth Project’s international event, The P Word Conference, which has tickets available for an online event at the end of September. It follows a raft of media success in May when the Sunday Express, Sunday Mirror, Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror online together with Politics.co.uk reported on the charity’s resources to teachers and parents in helping support young people after accessing pornography.
When Jersey Road started providing PR support to Visible Ministries, we had the aim to champion our client in freeing lives from the damaging impact of pornography. To do this, we set out to better profile the Naked Truth Project through telling their story to a broader audience.
Our aim was to position the Naked Truth as a thought leader over how churches respond to issue of pornography addiction. Similarly, we aimed to raise awareness of events such as the P Word Conference, the Christian charity’s education offering and small group work.
Although compulsive pornography use is more commonplace than it used to be, pornography is definitely not a widely used word in Christian churches and religious or group settings. Many people are not comfortable talking about “the P word”, less still accessing support for the damaging effect it has on individuals, families and communities.
A further challenge is that large and small events are already plentiful online and generating fresh media interest to cut through the general noise can be difficult.
To gain media traction we decided to commission new nationally representative research aiming to understand general beliefs and attitudes towards pornography.
This new data would be relevant to large numbers of people and generate an interesting headline amid controversial news already in the media.
Providing an excellent case study and guest speaker from the project’s conference accompanied our approach to TV broadcasters with the survey results.
‘It’s been a real privilege working with Ian Henderson and the Naked Truth Project,’ says Gareth Russell, Managing Director at Jersey Road PR. ‘This recent raft of headline news rightly shines a spotlight on the excellent work being undertaken by the Naked Truth Project. The strategic media approach undertaken by Jersey Road’s team of PR experts was able to provide the best birthday present we could have hoped for.’
Ian Henderson, CEO of Visible Ministries says: ‘I’m convinced that this coverage will help the Naked Truth Project and P word conference to inform, inspire and provide practical support to many more men, women and young people struggling with compulsive pornography use.’
If you’re considering the need to build your public profile and amplify your organisation’s voice in the media, we would love to hear from you.
Find out more about the P Word Conference.
Written by Theresa Stone, Training and Development Manager, Jersey Road PR.
Securing local media coverage is an excellent way to raise your profile in your community, build trust and encourage people to take action. Here are five steps to help you get great local media coverage:
