Wow, July has been an incredibly active month for the Foundation in the media and a really good month to put up the first of many PR related blog posts. The PR team and all the spokespeople have truly kept their heads down and driven our messages in the media. All the hard work has resulted in an average of 2 pieces of coverage for every working day in July – quite incredible.
Some of this month's highlights include:
The cover story in iWeek magazine with a 3 page article featuring interviews with Andrew Rens, Bob Jolliffe, Jon Bosak, Rob Weir, and Patrick Durusau.
Steve Song's Village Telco project featured in the Economist and headlined on Russell Southwood's Balancing Act Africa.com.
The Freedom Toaster team's Unisa deal resulted in 21 pieces of coverage (quite amazing), including stints on eTV, 702 Talk Radio, Business Day, MoneyWeb and many many more.
Helen King fearlessly tackled Microsoft on its donation to the Department of Education and achieved excellent coverage in Die Beeld. (No they didn't make her speak Afrikaans)
The end of the Kusasa project was a bit of a downer in the media but it didn't dent the Foundation's reputation. A lesson the PR team learnt from this is to better educate the key media and ease them into these types of announcements before issuing the press release. While the news was negative, not many of the media understood that the project delivered value during its existence (and after) – they simply reported on the ending of the project. This is very much the nature of the media but we can do more to prevent this response in the future.
Some cool happenings to look out for in August are the 2 Games & Learning Indaba's happening in Cape Town and Jozi, and the Open Everything conversation going down in Cape Town. On top of this there will be the usual PR activities of pitching for interviews, identifying new influential media, bringing more journalists over to the light side, and the occasional 'gentle nudge' to get coverage ;)
A big thanks to all the spokespeople for offering their valuable time and their voices, and to all the internal guys who keep everything running smoothly.