Why I'd never pitch an Awareness Day
...but I grudgingly concede they can be useful
Full disclosure: I have a love/hate relationship with awareness days/weeks/months, which largely falls down on the “hate” side.
I’ve previously posted on Instagram about my belief that people are either already painfully “aware” of an issue, or they don’t care about it because it doesn’t affect them or people they know - and an awareness day is unlikely to change that.
But I have increasingly had to accept awareness days can be useful in pitching. So for this week’s Get Featured, I thought I’d share how you can be smart about using them and the pitfalls to avoid.
An Awareness Day is not a news story
The main reason I’m anti-awareness days is that they’re largely meaningless - especially from a news perspective. This is because there are just so many of them, so every day is an awareness day for something or other.
This month, for example, it’s Mouth Cancer Action Month, Lung Cancer Awareness Month, Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, Movember (for prostate cancer awareness) and COPD Awareness Month (thanks to this useful calendar for this intel). It’s too much.
So the simple fact that an awareness day/week/month is happening is not a news story.
For anything about an awareness day to make the news pages of the national press, it has to meet the requirements for any national news story:
✅ It needs to be something the wide general public care about.
✅ It has to resonate with the interests/concerns of the publication’s readership.
✅ It needs to speak to people on a human level.
✅ There has to be something new about it.
(I’ve shared loads of detailed info about what makes a national story in this post.)
Most people are not interested in what awareness day it is today, so the fact another one is occurring rarely meets these requirements.
But people are interested in stories about the awareness day topic which tick all these boxes.
Use Awareness Day topics as inspiration to pitch
Today, for example, it’s White Ribbon Day, a day recognising the need to end violence against women - which I’m absolutely not questioning is a worthy cause.
It’s not news that today’s awareness day happens to be this one. But you can use this awareness day as a news hook to pitch stories like:
Strong case studies of women harmed by violence.
Positive case studies of schemes working to prevent violence against women.
Data showing the scale of violence against women and how this compares with previous years.
You get the idea: When you take a topic that is relevant and interesting to a publication’s target audience, and bring in some new stats or a moving case study, then you’ve got a great pitch.
But this is the case whether it’s an awareness day or not - and that’s the problem.
Beware the “Awareness Day avalanche”
My biggest beef with awareness days is people tend to hyper focus on the issue on this one day, which can ultimately result in the awareness message being diluted.
Take the issue of violence against women: This is an issue I am interested in 365 days of the year. You don’t need to wait until the run-up to White Ribbon Day to pitch a story on this topic to me. In fact, if you do, you’re likely to run the risk of being up against a lot of competition, as multiple other people will be pitching the same topic on the same day.
News publications have to cover a multitude of subjects (health, housing, inflation, women’s rights, celebrity gossip, etc) and they typically only have limited space each day for each topic. When we receive lots of pitches on the same topic around an awareness day, the amount of space allocated to that topic doesn’t change - it just means competition for that slot is higher.
When we receive lots of pitches on the same topic, the amount of coverage doesn’t change… but perfectly good stories don’t get featured
The result is that perfectly good stories - which would have been used any other day of the year - don’t get featured. If these pitches were paced throughout the year instead, then more would be accepted and the subject would get more airtime.
It’s also worth noting: I have editors who actively avoid running anything pegged to an awareness day because they don’t want to look like they’re copying competitors.
Don’t ever feel like you need to hold back a good story for an awareness day - pitch it now!
Jump on trending topics to pitch your expertise
Having said that, awareness days can be a great way to get explainer articles or expert insights featured that might not be picked up at any other time.
Online publications often like to create content around trending topics, and because awareness day hashtags tend to trend on social media, this is a good chance to push your (or your client’s) expertise.
For example, you could pitch:
What is White Ribbon Day? I’m a domestic violence expert/victim and this is why it’s needed.
Why are people wearing white ribbons? This is what they mean.
The key is to make sure you’re pitching content the journalist couldn’t easily pick up elsewhere - and to remember you’re up against everyone else pitching the same thing.
So, when you pitch around an awareness day, make sure you’ve got some up-to-date stats or analysis (ideally new/original to you) and/or some punchy expert quotes ready to go.
I fully accept I’m a bit of an awareness day Scrooge. I’d love to hear whether you find them useful or annoying - let me know in the comments!