This post was originally produced for Forbes.
A bit of good press can play a role in attracting capital, new hires and customers. Entrepreneurs often sense that this is the case but have no idea how to get media to pay attention.
Paraphrasing Jerry Seinfeld, it is important to understand that there is no success police. No one is monitoring the activities of all the social entrepreneurs in the world to identify the brilliant new ideas and share them. Your success is up to you. Don’t wait to be discovered. It will be a long wait.
Next, you’ll want to find someone who writes about the sort of thing you do. Search the news on Google for stories about direct competitors or about the social problem you hope to address. This takes time. You want to be sure you understand the journalist’s beat before you prepare a pitch.
One of the mistakes I often see is that people pitch a tangent to a story I’ve written that has nothing to do with my narrow focus on social entrepreneurship and impact investin…