The Australian Lottery and Newsagents Association (ALNA) advocates for the largest non-franchised family owned business sector in Australia. ALNA utilises its industry and government relationships to provide advocacy and support to its members, and as the peak industry body, is the only lottery and newsagent association with ACCC authorisation to represent its members nationally.
HOW WE WORK
ALNA needed a communications strategy that covers member communication as well as stakeholder, government, media, and internal relations.
On the media side, Pure Public Relations has helped turn ALNA into the go-to authority on small business and newsagent stories. ALNA’s CEO Ben Kearney is now a key media talent, with journalists and producers coming directly to him through Pure Public Relations at the early stages of planning a story.
Government relations work includes communications and media relations as part of a recent lobbying campaign that successfully saw the Australian Government ban irresponsible lotteries like Lottoland. Internally, we’ve created a communications plan for every state manager, in order to help them communicate better with their members. We have also helped communicate changes to members through infographics, a re-created newsletter, social media, letters, and a member magazine.
Our member communications work includes creating and managing the first-ever National Newsagents Week, which was created to engage members and increased foot traffic in their stores. Members were empowered to reach out to their local press to share their promotions and celebrations, and national media coverage was secured by Pure Public Relations to promote community newsagents.
Our industry body engaged Pure Public Relations a couple of years ago to assist with our media releases and to lift our media profile and broaden our reach and influence on issues impacting our member small businesses.
Ben Kearney, CEO, ALNA
Phoebe Netto and her team at Pure PR have achieved this and so much more for us! Not only have they assisted us to get considerably more media coverage for our organisation on a wide range of issues, they have also helped to build the professional profile of senior staff and they have also assisted us to directly improve our overall communications capacity.
This has included areas like internal comms models, staff skills coaching and re-branding and broadening our communications touch points. When we started with them, these were all things that we didn’t know we would need and that we never expected that they would help us with, yet they have delivered them all professionally, within our budget, and while adding value to our not for profit organisation and our members.
Not long after engaging them we had to undertake an intensive national advocacy and public relations campaign to successfully see through amendments to federal legislation that had the potential if not addressed to disrupt our whole industry. Pure Public Relations worked above and beyond on this campaign with us, sometimes dealing with crisis management on particular contested issues and addressing issues early and late in the day and in different time zones like they were a dedicated part of our team. We achieved an incredible outcome for a small organisation as a result.
This is how we see Pure PR now, they are part of our team, and a critical part that we rely on and which we really value.
RESULTS
ALNA now appears regularly in mainstream media, and has strengthened its ability to communicate with its own members.
ALNA has appeared in:
- Television – Sky News, Ch 9 News, Ch 7 News, WIN, all local stations
- Newspapers – The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Age, Courier Mail, The West Australian, multiple local outlets
- Online – News.com.au, ABC Online, SBS.com.au, and more
- Radio – Radio National, 3AW, ABC Radio across every state, 2GB, 6PR Radio, Fiveaa Adelaide
- Business media – The CEO Magazine, SmartCompany, Kochie’s Business Builders, Business Daily, My Business, Dynamic Business, Business Acumen, Inside Small Business, Talking Business podcast
- Retail media – Inside Retail, Convenience World, Franchise Business, RetailBiz, Retail World, The Retailer