Government channels may want to consider partner ships with other professional organizations who may have similar goals and lend themselves to natural partnerships.
In Southern California, SCAN NATOA provides partnership opportunities for its members. One is the annual "The Great City Hall Tune In," a regional marketing campaign that brings cities together to jointly promote viewership of City Council meetings on their government access channels.
"The Great City Hall Tune In" is usually done in October of each year. Participating cities receive an idea sampler, templates for print ads, draft press releases, commentaries and commendations along with a set of on-air TV promos. A public relations professional is hired to promote the campaign using major media outlets.
SCAN NATOA released its "Key to the City" campaign Summer 1999. This marketing campaign can be used by any government channel to promote viewership.
Partnerships can be established with local news organizations such as RTNA (Radio TV News Association) or news departments at broadcast television stations. Often broadcast news stations have a steady flow of volunteer interns interested in careers in broadcast journalism. They learn about how news is produced and how assignments are completed, but the interns are not allowed hands-on access to equipment or the opportunity to produce their own news stories. The interns work free at a government access channel to get the videotape and the experience. This creates an ample supply of free field reporters for news, entertainment and sports programs.
In Santa Monica, the channel is active in a partnership with PIRATES, the Print Interactive Radio and Television Educational Society. The organization is primarily composed of public relations professionals from non-profit organizations. This creates a resource of interview guests, news releases and outreach opportunities for the channel. PIRATES jointly puts on PSA workshops, Media Spokesperson Training Workshops and Public Affairs Programming shows with the City of Santa Monica. In most cases, non-Santa Monica organizations pay to participate in the workshops, providing Santa Monica with quality PSAs, programs at no hard cost, a valuable media opportunity, and resource to the non-profit organization.
Santa Monica also has a partnership with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Women's Steering Committee. The DGA Women's Steering Committee provides qualified women directors who volunteer to produce a five-minute video about a Santa Monica non-profit organization. Santa Monica provides the production crew and editing facilities for the video.
This is an excellent situation. The women directors get a high quality documentary piece for their demo reel. The non-profits get a free five-minute video about their organization. And, CityTV gets high quality, local programming without having to pay for a Producer/Director/Writer. The project has been honored several times with a local Emmy Award.
Involving non-profit organizations in your community is a great way to build support and programming for the government access channel. Since there are many non-profit organizations in a community, a government channel may choose to only work with non-profit organizations funded by the city for human or social services. This narrows some resources, yet still provides plenty of organizations to work with, and is easy to justify to others.
Non-profits can be involved in many ways with the government access channel. They can provide public service announcements, bulletin board messages, and other shows. In Santa Monica, non-profits participate in public service announcement production workshops, half-hour public affairs shows, the five-minute DGA project, announcements used on the news show, and interview guests for the news show. Santa Monica viewers and community leaders are interested in publicizing the work of local non-profit organizations. In return, the channel has been honored with community service awards, receives publicity in organization newsletters, and has support for community activities.