Skills-Building

I believe one major critical tool of empowerment is training women in media relations as integral part of their development programme.

As women, we need to know and master the power of the media and how to use it effectively.

A programme or work of a woman leader can be negatively affected by lack of the following media skills:
Informing the media about own campaign or issues in time;
How to conduct and manage a press conference;
When and how to use emotions to state facts;
How to manage difficult or "ruthless" interviewers;
How to appeal to your electorate through the media
Managing interviews in crisis situation;
Communicating conflict crisis without fuelling it;
Designing strategic events that will draw media attention;
Power dress for media appearances,etc.

More critical to this is time management with the media.
Many campaigns/events fail to get full multimedia coverage because of poor time management of the programme and events coordination that does not take into consideration newsroom deadlines.

We also need to empower women's organisations and leaders with the wisdom to include media and marketing budgets in their annual budgets but also have fully functional communication units that will prepare their leader for interviews and secure succesful media coverage.

Boitumelo Mofokeng
South Africa
Director/Owner of Media Pack - a media relations specialist company

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Comments

Mastering the media

Submitted by EGoldman on Tue, 2007-12-04 17:02.

I would also add that it is important for women candidates to master a variety of media forms from internet to television to newspapers so they can maximize the number of people who will be able to hear their message. While not all constituents may have a television it may be possible for the candidate to reach her constituents with a weekly radio show or a question and answer session on air. Whereas older people may listen to a television advertisement for a candidate, a candidate can reach younger voters through the internet as they may frequent internet cafes etc.

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Building woomen leaders is long term and complex commitment

Submitted by Gulnara on Sat, 2007-05-05 06:13.

I would like to great all participants for very rich discussion and the organizers for involving us in such a challenging discussion. With group of co thinkers we founded NGO " Democracy Today " in Armenia around 13 years ago.Observations and analysis, experience from working with women brought us to adopting of the multi step long term strategy , that brought quite positive results already . We decided to start with local governance ( as we work much with women in rural areas) , we surveyed community on qualities of women and men they would see in order to be elected , help community meeting on proposing women candidates, organized to selected candidates intensive training : on public speaking, media relations ,laws ,managements , assisted then in preparing campaign. In elections we had elected from a group of 18 women 9 mayors and 4 members of council. Second step was to assist these elected women to manage successfully their communities , women from village selected " shadow cabinet" coalition of women representing various professions and knowledge that would help women candidate to run office . These women have been also trained and now they have regular meetings and support to mayor. As a next step w created coalition of women mayors to come up together as team to solve political issues and as future step we see preparing our women to be in Parliament.
I think it is long process , but very empowering. Women have changed greatly and community attitude changed much.I think important tool from women is learning to support women

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