By Laura Haight
DFW Communications Director

There are some amazing things happening in dining rooms, kitchens, living rooms and great rooms across the country. Some of them are newsworthy – perhaps to a DFW audience or sometimes for a more general interest audience.

The most common content is photos – from anniversaries, fundraisers or meetings with special speakers. Social media gives us ways to share a lot of photos that don’t find a home on our website with a large audience every day. While photos tell a story, they do need a little help in the form of captions and descriptions. It’s important for us to know who’s in the photo, what they’re doing, where they are from and why it’s significant. Large group photos of your chapter do not need to identify each person; but photos of five or fewer should include IDs with first and last name, location, title and affiliation, from left to right.

To help make it easier for you to submit content to us for consideration, we have an online DFW Communications Request form.

You can attach photos and additional documentation directly through the form that will keep your request and all the information in one place. It may not be possible to respond personally to each request but we will try to let you know if your photo is being used somewhere.

To help determine if an event or information is newsworthy outside of your chapter or geographic location, consider these questions:

• Was the speaker widely known? If you had a local author at your meeting, that may be of interest to readers of your Facebook page or perhaps your local media, but less likely to interest a broader audience. But if you had Chelsea Clinton speak to your group, that would be of broad interest and could warrant a press release to your local media or a blog post on our website.
• Was it an occasion? Is it your fifth anniversary dinner? Your 10th? Those occasions should be marked and we’d love to see the photo. Did something unusual happen? Patricia Anderson, who many know as the long-time director of DFW’s travel program, wrote a post about two people in her Oregon chapter who found that they shared a unique experience: one owned the house that the other grew up in. It was a neat story and we published it on our blog.
• Did your local paper, magazine or news station produce a story about your chapter or about Dining for Women? We scan Google for alerts every day, but we don’t see everything. If something was published about you, please email us the link to the story online. If the website is protected behind a paywall, we suggest scanning the original article as a pdf and sending us the file. But the website link is much preferred if you can get it.
• In the newspaper industry, we used to refer to “Hey, Martha” stories. Those are the stories you talk about to friends, that you discuss over coffee at the kitchen table. If you have one, we definitely want to know.

Of course, submitting something to us does not guarantee we’ll use it or the time frame it will take for us to post it somewhere. But we can’t use what we don’t know exists.