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Sending out press releases can be a great way of raising your profile and getting your business's message out there – especially valuable for social enterprises with broader aims than just growing profits. But many social enterprises aren't big enough to employ their own publicity staff, and not everyone's confident enough to take the DIY approach. Sarah Irving offers a few tips...

1.Keep it short
Journalists are, generally speaking, idle. Or at least overworked. Whichever they want to tell themselves. If your press release is three pages of densely-packed detail and quotes from everyone who's ever been within ten feet of your project, they will zone out at the second paragraph.
Try to keep the main body of the press release to three reasonably short paragraphs, featuring the key message and facts you want to get over, some supporting information and one or two quotes from significant players. Try to make sure that the first sentence, at least, is short, punchy and attention-getting (or at least clear). More in-depth information, background and longer quotations can go in numbered 'notes for editors' after the main text.

2. Keep it simple
Unless you have very good software, resist the urge to make your press releases look fancy. The more html, graphics and other prettiness you include, the bigger the chance that someone's email programme isn't going to be able to read it, or that it will get jumbled, or that it will be too big and infuriate someone by crashing their inbox.
If your information is boring or irrelevant, no amount of patterned backgrounds or bright colours is going to help. Use plain text that anyone will be able to read and that is least likely to distort itself on alien software.

3. Don't tell everyone who you're sending it to
Unless your company or organisation can afford to subscribe to PR services which send your email out in bulk, it's likely you'll be using the mailing list feature of a standard email programme, or inputting addresses yourself. It's vital that you ensure that the recipients of an email can't see all the other people who've received it. Disclosing whole lists like this is really bad manners, as it opens recipients up to spam emails and other online abuses, and will infuriate and alienate people you're meant to be getting onto your side. Ensure you always use the BCC field for email addresses, and check your email software to make sure that distribution list names don't also need to be moved into the BCC field.

4. Lies damn lies and statistics
If you can include in your press release statistics, survey data or percentages, definitely do so. Journalists love 'em, and headline writers even more so. How many articles have you seen headed 'One in three...' or 'ninety percent of...' or 'biggest ever...'? However tenuous or spurious the connection, dropping these into your PR is a great way of keeping journos happy.

5. Human interest
Alongside facts and figures, one of the things that will endear you to someone writing a story from your press release is supplying them with ready-made quotations – then they can use them and it looks like they've actually gone so far as to interview someone. It also breaks up text nicely, making a press release read much better if statements about why your event is interesting/significant/vital can be framed as a quote. And if you can also use comments from service users, customers, policy makers or other interested parties, this gives a wider scope and more human feel to your story that can make it stand out.

6. Make sure you give full contact details! You'd be surprised how many people manage to leave these off. And make sure you've also remembered to give all relevant times, dates and places – there's nothing more embarrassing than having to send out a second press release with corrections and omissions.

Sarah Irving is a freelance journalist who has done press and PR for several small social enterprises, including Olive Co-operative and UHC Collective, and for a number of local campaigns and causes. She's successfully attracted coverage in broadsheet newspapers and on mainstream TV, as well as in the local and regional press. See www.sarahirving.net