Having trouble building your advocacy campaign? According to three lobbying experts, it could be because you are not taking full advantage of the media.

In the book “Nonprofit Management 101,” Nayantara Mehta, Nancy Chen, Marcia Avner, and Jeannie Fox wrote that creating a media communications plan is an essential ingredient to building advocacy campaigns. Much like your efforts to move messages in your lobbying and organizing work, they claimed that building relationships with media outlets can help meet your policy objectives.

Building these relationships can lead have the following three results, according to Mehta, Chen, Avner, and Fox:

• Positive media coverage can move your message to the general public, who may not know much about your issue or organization.
• News that features stories on your issue, framed in a favorable way, can shore up your position and increase your influence.
• In striving to represent their own constituents, community leaders keep careful track of what is being said in all forms of media in order to gauge public will on an issue.