ACPR Blog

There was an interesting email interchange on th UKPress group today about using clippings on your website, which is useful for anyone running a small business and trying to get PR coverage. Journalist Stephen Pritchard came up with some good advice, “If you post the whole article, whether a scan, a PDF or posting the text as HTML, you need a copyright agreement with the paper. In general the nationals will grant this, as long as they in turn own the copyright or have a syndication agreement with the contributor. They will ask for a fee. This will vary according to the piece and its use, but it is usually from about £50 to a few hundred pounds. Best people to speak to are in syndication or for a smaller title, the publisher.” 

If you’d like to win a copy of the new book, just visit the FFW website and email antonia@acpr.co.uk  to tell us what you liked or disliked about the site,  or recommend a resource you think other parents might find helpful. Enter by mindnight 29 Feb 2008.

You have just one more day to buy the Wedding Media Contacts database, THE easiest way to promote your business to wedding magazine editors across the UK. packed with contacts for national and local wedding magazines, this database makes it really easy to send out details of your new wedding products or services. Put YOUR business in front of thousands of brides to be with the essential Wedding Media Contacts database. No bridal business should be without it.
Find out more and buy here for just £90 or email antonia@acpr.co.uk. Offer expires end 29 February

Katy Buckley of Liefde has been working on her PR recently, with good results. Here she explains what she did, “I decided that it was really important to do some PR for my new product, Mamaflage and asked Antonia Chitty to prepare a Press Release for me to tie in with Breastfeeding Awareness Week in May.  After receiving the Press Release, I started to plough through the list of contacts from ACPR and email as many of them as I could given the limited time I had.”

Katy was out shopping when she got her first call back as a result of sending the release. She says, “I was surprised to hear from the Picture Desk for Times 2 who said I had five minutes to get an image across as they were doing an article on Mamaflage.  Luckily, I managed to contact my graphic design company who sent the images on my behalf.  If I couldn’t have sent the image there and then I would not have had the article in the paper. ”

“I didn’t know exactly what they were writing and just expected a tiny piece but when I opened up the paper at 7:30 a.m. after rushing to the garage the next morning I discovered that I was nearly a quarter of a page! Quote “Breast-feeding made stylish in the 21st century”.  I was thrilled. My phone was busy that day and I received calls from researchers at the Richard and Judy Show and the Alan Titchmarsh Show.  I was also asked to do a radio interview for an Irish station that afternoon and have since been approached by a Mother and Baby magazine to have my product featured in a trial due in May for Breastfeeding Awareness Week.  I am so glad that I made time in between looking after my 3 children aged 5,3 and 1 and never ever expected something that I first thought of 5 years ago to be featured in The Times.”

When you are writing a press release, content for your website or a leaflet, you need to get yourself inside the mind of the reader. This will help you understand how they make decisions, and hopefully you can then persuade them to buy.

There are three things that will help you understand your customers better:

1. Who they are. What do you know about your audience’s age, sex, family, life stage, income, home etc? Look at your existing customers to get some ideas.

2. What do they do? Thing about how often, when and where they might need your product or service, and on what occasions. Do some types of client need your business regularly, while others do only occasionally? What are your customer’s priorities for spending: most parents need to cover necessities like food and bills, then treat the kids, then look after their own needs, for example. In this section, also think about what your target audience read and view. Do they get most of their information from TV, magazines, newspeprs or the internet?

3. How do people think and feel? This may be the hardest thing to get a grip on, but understanding why people behave the way they do can help you tailor your business to their needs. Is your customer’s prime motivation convenience or reliability? What are their beliefs, desires and wants? What is a parent saying when buying clothes or toys for their baby or child: it is a way of showing love and care. Also look at who influences your customers: parents, friends, peers.

Keep the question, “Why do people do that?” in mind when promoting your business and it will help you focus your efforts for maximum success.

Many thanks to Linda Baldwin for posting the first customer review for Family  Friendly Working on Amazon. She says, “A lovely book written by someone who has actually applied the advice and principles within this book herself as a mum who works from home. Discarding the rose-tinted specs, Antonia includes both high and low points of being a home based working parent by including many real-life examples of a truly broad range of flexible working parents, from party-plans to teleworking, freelancing or setting up a new business from scratch. Franchises and flexi-time are also covered in this wonderful book - a must read for every parent who is working and wondering how to spend more time with their family, as well as parents who are at home with their familes yet seeking a way to return to work or embark upon a family friendly career. ”

Cheers Linda!

Family Friendly Working: Inspiring ideas for making money when you have kids by Antonia Chitty

Publication date 18 February 2008

Every mum makes a tough decision about returning to work after having a baby. Having a second child can make the cost of childcare outweigh what you earn. And it’s hard to combine being there for your schoolchildren with a full time job. Mother and small business advisor Antonia Chitty has put together a guide for parents which is full of case studies and ideas for finding work that fits comfortably around having kids. She advises not only on starting a business, but also on working for someone else or freelancing, with lots of advice, pros and cons and contributions from other parents who have been there before. If you have had enough of trying to do too much in too little time, and feel torn between work and spending time with your children, this book will guide you through the options. Do you make something that might be saleable? Have you got a skill you could use to earn in the evenings or while the children are asleep? What courses might help you retrain AND still be there when the kids get home from school? Whether you need to earn something just to boost the family budget or have ideas for a business that could support your family if only you knew how to get started, this is the book for you. Buy it now from www.familyfriendlyworking.co.uk, www.acpr.co.uk or www.amazon.co.uk. Order from your local bookshop, quoting ISBN 978 1 905410 26 2 

Family friendly working is officially out on 18^th Feb, but we have had some coverage in advance in Prima AND Prima Baby magazines, as well as a review in Families Magazine.

Review of Family Friendly Working from Families magazine

If you find yourself, as so many mothers do, back in the office trying to squash five days work into four, not seeing your children as much as you’d like while spending almost your entire salary on childcare, this is the book for you.

Family Friendly Working principally sets out a list of options open to the mother (or father) who intends to work but doesn’t want to miss out on her child’s early years. From turning a cake-making hobby into a thriving business, to training as an antenatal teacher or becoming a house-to-house rep for an established company, the suggestions are limitless. It also covers the basic principles of setting up your own business such as applying for patents and protecting copyrights, finding manufacturers and creating websites. A thorough list of web addresses provides back-up support and ideas, all for occupations that can fit neatly into family life. Although the book concentrates on setting up your own business in some form, whether it be selling knitted tea cosies over the internet or buying your own franchise of Monkey Music, it also offers valuable advice on negotiating a better working situation with your existing employers through flexi-time, job sharing and compressed hours, an option definitely worth considering. It’s not all rosy out there in the world of the small business, as the author points out, but with some compromises having both a family and a job – and enjoying both – can be done. FSW Rating: Four Stars