askCHARITY Contact Us

Top tips for creating your charity's profile on askCHARITY

Browse around the site
Your charity's name
Charity categories
Answer Service
Key words
Short description - an introduction to your charity
Long description
National or Regional?
Details of media contacts
What's ISDN?

1. Browse around the site
Before you begin your entry, have a good look around the website. See the 2800 + charities who've already signed up to the directory, try some searches using various key words and browse through the list of categories.

2. Your charity's name
If your charity is known by both your acronym and your full name, make sure you list both e.g. ARC (Antenatal Results and Choices)

3. Charity categories
Choose your categories wisely. It is your first and second categories that matter most; they should be the ones you feel are most appropriate to your charity.

4. Answer Service
Journalists use the askCHARITY Answer Service to send particular story requests to categories of charities. You will only receive requests sent by journalists to the first two categories you selected for your charity. Requests will arrive in your email inbox.

When you do receive an Answer Service request and want to respond, you'll be able to email or call that journalist directly. The journalists' details can always be found at the top of each request, do not simply hit the reply button as your reply will go to the askCHARITY team instead.

All requests have a deadline. Please don't contact the journalist after the deadline has passed.

5. Key words
These are absolutely crucial in helping journalists searching the directory to find your charity. Your charity will appear in a search if your key words match those a journalist has used. Put in as many relevant key words as possible. Include misspellings of your charity's name, plurals, the titles of research reports, projects you work on, your Chief Executive's name and so on (e.g. Alcohol Concern have entered keywords such as drink, pubs, binge, drinking, under-age, bars, booze, asbo, alco, concren, alchol, alcohl, treatment and many more)

6. Short description - an introduction to your charity
This is what a journalist will find about your charity in their search results. It's a very brief summary so make it punchy and clear. Include the key information that will tell journalists what they need to know about your charity - what your charity does, who are your clients, how are you unique, what can you offer the media?

7. Long description
This allows journalists to find out a bit more about your charity's work. This fuller description appears on the askCHARITY web page which is dedicated to your charity. Here you can describe in more detail the activities of your charity, the spokespeople you can put forward, the kind of case studies you have access to etc.

8. National or Regional?
Some charities have both national and regional offices. If you would like all your offices listed please make separate askCHARITY entries for the national, and each regional office.

9. Details of media contacts
Journalist and programme makers using askCHARITY tell us they want the following from every charity:

the name and job title of the person or people they can contact with
a media enquiry
a direct line and a mobile number
an e-mail address which is personal (rather than info@ or press@)

Those charities with mobile numbers are highlighted in askCHARITY search results and therefore tend to get more contact from the journalists.

10. What's ISDN?
This is not about whether you have a broadband connection, but is for those charities who can put a spokesperson in an onsite studio/sound proofed room and link them up to a broadcast radio studio to give a broadcast quality interview via an ISDN line. If you do not have this facility please don't tick "ISDN available".

How to get help from us
Please email Emma or call her on 020 7426 8877.

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