Charity Media Monitor

What is the Charity Media Monitor (CMM)?

Many charities understandably focus on journalists as a key target group for their communications, since journalists are gatekeepers to media coverage. Whether it is in fundraising, corporate issues or campaigning, if journalists do not see an issue as newsworthy or interesting it is much harder to get coverage. The media monitor is a regular poll directly to journalists to find out what they think of charities, their media activities and their work in general. It is designed to help charities sharpen their media work and make better use of their limited resources.

Many charities already evaluate media output through analysis of press clippings. The CMM complements this work since media evaluation can help a media team understand why stories haven’t been taken up or what hook or angle might have been more effective. The CMM helps charities understand how effective they are perceived to be by journalists and how they could improve their performance. Each participant will be able to see which charities are ranked highly by journalists and what journalists see as an effective way to get the message across to them.

The specific uses of the information from the media monitor will include:

• Seeing how well journalists remember an organisation, its issues/campaigns or events that they have run
• Understanding which sections (e.g. regional journalists and TV journalists) of the media have a good impression of a charity and which sections have a poor impression
• Understanding the best ways to get a story into the media and the best way to build a relationship with a journalist
• Understanding the issues which personally concern journalists the most

By being part of a syndicate, individual charities are able to get more frequent (twice a year) and more detailed information on journalists than has ever been possible before, for a fixed fee.

Fieldwork

We carry out the fieldwork ourselves using nfpSynergy’s extensive research resources. The Monitor is a mix of online questionnaires and telephone interviews. We normally receive around  200 completed questionnaires. We conduct between ten and twelve Executive Interviews each wave alternating between national, regional and online journalists, as well as charity media managers.

The economics of the syndicate

Existing subscribers to the Charity Awareness Monitor (CAM) will be charged £4,500 plus VAT, and non-CAM subscribers will be charged £5,500 plus VAT for a year (i.e. two polls).  Charity Parliamentary Monitor (CPM) subscribers also receive a discount.

The survey sample consists of:

• National TV journalists
• Local TV journalists
• National Radio journalists
• Local Radio journalists
• Broadsheet journalists
• Tabloid journalists
• Local/ Regional newspapers
• Trade media
• Monthlies
• Freelancers

What questions are asked?

• Which charities have directly impressed you in the last 6 months?
• Which specific charity events, campaigns or news stories can you recall in the last 6 months?
• Which charity first comes to mind in the following areas of work?
• Have you had contact with the following (named) charities in the last 6 months?
• How effective were they?
• Please tell us what are the good things that charities can do to get media coverage…And the bad things!
• Other questions

nfpSynergy will automatically record the relevant data about each responding journalist: organisation, job title, type of media, speciality, region.

In-depth reports

The in-depth reports focus on different topics every wave, and charities can suggest any issues that they'd like to see discussed. Examples of past topics include: