This past Wednesday I finished developing an project I’ve started called Message Mastery, where the goal is to equip 200 Muslim brothers and sisters on producing effective and profitable dawah videos. Not only produce them, but also equip them with the tools necessary to develop, write, produce, edit, market and distribute their the call to Islam.

With any sincere initiative, Allah-swt sends down tests…

Saturday, the day we decided to produce the introduction video we had thunderstorm that knocked down plenty of branches and powerlines in the neighborhood. No power, no internet, no light, no heat. Where to go to meet my Sunday night deadline? – The house of Allah-swt!

I went to the masjid for Isha, and spent the whole night finishing up development and begin editing on a client project while I pondered on how to make these videos for message mastery. I prayed fajr, ate breakfast, and went home to get some rest. I woke around duhr time, to find that dad bought a generator to get the basic functions of the house going. — Our basement began flooding since the pump was off due to lack of water.

Shooting Time!

Only having a couple hours to shoot, I borrowed my little brother’s room, put up the lights, camera, mic…and action!

That night in the process of capturing, the generator went out. I resorted to using my car’s engine power and ciggarette power converter to power my laptop, hard drive, and camera as I captured the video. When I had 30 mins remaining in capturing the footage, I decided to drive to my university where I can have power and internet access.

I arrived around mid-night, prayed isha, and burned the midnight oil. Once Fajr came in, I just had some touch ups to make. I went to work, and made the final changes and set it to render. Below is the result. Watch the video

Now that you’ve watched video…take action! Do the following:

• Go to messagemastery.com and tell me 1….2….or..3 things you want to be able to learn from this program (you can post it here if you like as well), by posting it in the comment.
• Sign up for the early bird notification list by going to: http://www.messagemastery.com/earlybird

If you have your own business or are working on a major project you must have a media kit. If you don’t have a media kit available to give members of the media, your business or project looks very amateur and hardly worth promoting in the news.

So what is a media kit? This is something usually put together by your PR person/firm working for you. It includes press releases, a backgrounder, a fact sheet, a bio, an image bank and more. And it’s getting to the point to where media kits are best done digitally. Make a kit and put it all on a CD, make sure you package it creatively and send it to media outlets.

I created a media kit a while ago for Leechon – and more specifically for Tufaan. The “Press Section” on Tufaan’s website is composed of a couple of things I included in the media kit, including the image bank. I plan to update the media kit and create a creative, graphically appealing digital version of it soon.

Also, it’s pretty important you get someone in public relations do to this for you. Why? Because if you want to send press releases to print media (like newspapers), then you have to write in AP style (associated press style) it was a pain to learn most of the AP Style book by heart. For example:

Wrong: Leechon gave 20% of their profits to charity.

Right: Leechon gave 20 percent of their profits to charity.

—

Wrong: She lived on Burbank Dr.

Right: She lived on Burbank Drive.

BUT

Wrong: She lived on 123 Burbank Drive

Right: She lived on 123 Burbank Dr.

There are a lot of subtle differences. If you don’t write it the correct way in your press releases, they will most likely be thrown in the garbage by the editor. Your job is to provide everything for them and make their lives easier so they willingly give you free publicity by writing about your business or project. Also, if your writing – particularly news writing- isn’t strong, make sure you hire a PR person.

If you want to know exactly what goes into a media kit, I’ll go into detail on my blog since it might get pretty lengthy. I also would like to do a series about each element in a media kit including how to write a good press release, fact sheet and backgrounder. And hopefully at the end you’ll be able to do your own PR work (well, some of it at least).

Finally, I plan in the near future to run my own PR firm for Muslims. Alhamdulillah it’s something I can do at the comfort of my own home and alhamdulillah it’s something I can do quite well, bi’fadhlillahi ta’ala. I’m currently compiling a Muslim Media Database (MMD) with the information of all media outlets and the preferred way they’d like to be reached.

If you are looking for someone to do PR for your business or project go ahead and send me an email @ media (at) leechon.com . I plan now – and in the future – to only accept a few clients at a time. And most of all, it has to be something halal and something worth promoting.

To learn more about how to make a media kit, check out my post.

~Shirien

*apparently I’m going to have to go back and talk about what exactly a press release is and why we send them out. What PR people do is still something a lot of people aren’t aware of. But until then, know that half the stuff you see on the news are things covered due to someone sending a press release. Reporters aren’t always just at the right place at the right time (or know what’s going on everywhere). PR has a lot to do with that.