Campaign toolkit

Interview

Suitable for:

All types of organisations

What is it?

An interview is a conversation between someone from your organisation, or an expert that you are working with during the campaign, and a journalist.

Benefits

  • An interview gives you the chance to present your campaign to the media directly, to help sell it and bring it to life.

Limitations

  • There is no guarantee that the journalist will ask easy questions. Be prepared for any questions they may ask.

Contacting a journalist

  • When you run a campaign you will probably be asked by journalists to give an interview.
  • Equally you may also ask journalists if they are interested in interviewing the campaign spokesman or a specialist.

How to prepare

  • Find a journalist that is interested in Occupational Health & Safety topics:
    • Do the research on radio/TV programmes, newspaper Health & work sections – who runs them?
    • Look at articles published to find who is writing on your campaign topic and who might be interested in your campaign.
  • If you find a journalist, ask them if they have particular issues they would like to discuss and make sure you do your homework on these issues.
  • Do some research on the journalist and the publication:
    • What kind of media is it?
    • What is their reporting style?
    • Are they serious and balanced reporters, or are they aggressive and 'scoop' driven?
  • Try to foresee the questions and prepare a list of questions and answers.
  • Prepare the most important hard data that may be useful during the interview.

Running the interview

  • Don’t forget you are driving the interview:
    • You should always anticipate what the journalist will want to ask you, and be prepared with some good answers.
    • Also know what key points you want to get across.