Media kit review: The Nonprofit Association of Oregon

I became slightly obsessed with Portland, Ore., last winter. I stayed up all night watching the entire first season of a sketch comedy about the city. One of my closest friends and I decided we wanted to go to Portland for spring break our senior year. I found a graduate school in the area that had the program I wanted. I was given a book that happened to take place in Portland. The city just kept showing up.

                

I typed “nonprofit press kits” into the Google search bar on my computer this week. As I scrolled through the results, I noticed one from The Nonprofit Association of Oregon. I became more excited than a reasonable person should ever be about a media kit. I could not contain my excitement. The kit was about Oregon and nonprofits.

As excited as I was to find the media kit, I was disappointed by its contents. The news release and other components did not follow AP style rules. The different components also continually used acronyms for at least three different organizations involved. I understand not wanting to write out long organization names more than once, but as a reader I found myself unable to remember what the acronyms stood for.

The only quote I found in the entire media kit was buried in a paragraph of the news release. Because the quote did not stand alone in a paragraph, I almost forgot the news release contained one. There were also inconsistencies in the style of writing that were distracting for me as the reader.

My six-week journey of reviewing ends with this post. These six weeks of using my blog to review writing styles has shown me the value in critically looking at the work of others. The Lord has used what I looked at as just an assignment to grow me in more areas than writing.