How to craft media-friendly surveys

Public relations pros should take advantage of the media’s need for statistics and surveys

The media’s appetite for statistics and surveys is as healthy as ever, and newspapers, magazines and online media continue to reserve part of the news hole for attention-getting numbers. However, as media interest increases, so does the demand for well-constructed surveys with good methodology behind them. And since reporters and editors are getting swamped with survey pitches, it’s now a lot tougher to land placement for your survey.

The most media-friendly surveys have several common elements. Here’s a guide to creating and pitching your own surveys and increasing their impact.

Look forward: Surveys that talk about what happened last week are considered old news, explains Kate Alexander, a vice president at Porter-Novelli in New York.

“The key to media relations is anticipating what the media wants to cover,” says Alexander, who works with client PricewaterhouseCoopers on its Global CEO survey. “They’ll latch onto that, instead of something that regurgitates what’s already happened.” In other words, surveys that forecast are sexier than surveys that look backwards.