Steps for Developing a Media Plan

1. Decide which outlets are most influential to your target audience.  
• For example, if you’re working on a campaign to get your campus to buy renewable energy, your target audience is probably going to be the administration first, then students.  Therefore, the school-sponsored paper would probably be the best place to get coverage to get them to notice it.  
• Whereas if you were trying to educate lots of students about how to properly use the recycling system on campus, you might decide that public service announcements on the radio station was a better idea b/c more people listen to it.
• If you are working on a campaign to get the city your school is in to adopt a Renewable Portfolio Standard, your target audience is going to be people in the city, not just campus, so you would put much more attention on getting covered in city-wide outlets than on-campus outlets.
2. Decide the best way to get those outlets to cover the campaign
• For example, if you were trying to get the campus paper to cover renewable energy, you might do a big event that lots of people would see and wonder about so the paper would want to cover it.
• If you were trying to get the city-wide paper to cover you, you might do a press conference with local experts and alumni.
3. Make sure that you have a media plan for all of your campaign events
4. Put your ideas and events on a timeline