RISU Conducts Training Seminar “External Communication for Religious Organizations”

LVIV – On March 5-6, 2010, at the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), a specialized training seminar “External communication for religious organizations” is being held. The course is organized by RISU. The seminar is attended by 25 participants, mainly journalists representing publishing houses, magazines, press services of churches, and Christian radios. The course is conducted by practicing journalists and specialists in the fields of secular and religious PR.

“External communication for religious organizations” is a new training project of the PR School of RISU.  Its main purpose is to help churches and religious organizations establish cooperation with secular and religious mass media and teach them to create a quality media product and present it to the general public. RISU has cooperated through the PR School with Catholic and Protestant Churches and their press services for a year. Similar training courses were conducted in Kyiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Ternopil, and Khmelnytskyi, as well as in the Zaporizhzhia, Zhytomyr, and Kherson Oblasts. 

Similarly to all RISU work, the PR School is aimed at Ukrainian churches and religious organizations, which are our main partners in reporting on religious life of Ukraine.

The program of the two-day seminar includes lectures, training sessions, and discussions of such topics as religious stereotypes in the society, the church’s image in mass media, and PR technologies used by religious organizations in Ukraine and the world. The practical part of the course will familiarize the participants with the world of Ukrainian journalism since effective cooperation with mass media is impossible without an understanding of the main principles of editorial work. The practicing journalists will tell the audience about “the other side of life” of the Ukrainian media.

How to communicate with journalists correctly, how to prepare a press release in order for it to appear in the newspapers, how to organize events for journalists, monitoring, study of the target audience, advertisement – these and other questions constitute the core of the seminar.