Stampede Your Nonprofit into the National Spotlight

October 2026

Finding Your Nonprofit’s Buffalo Parade

On a Friday evening in late September, a stampede of buffalo puppets took over Lower Manhattan. To tourists, it was another quirky NYC experience. To locals commuting home, it was a nuisance. But to the volunteers and creative directors from St. Ann’s Warehouse, a small Brooklyn-based theater, it was a rocket to launch their organization into a broader conversation.

Credit: Teddy Wolff

The stampede had all of the elements for a national story: an eye-catching visual (a horde of buffalo puppets), cultural and/or news relevance (a Palestinian director using buffalo as a stand-in for indigenous populations) and an unconventional medium (again, a horde of buffalo puppets).

While your nonprofit doesn’t need something as ambitious as a life-sized puppet parade to land media coverage, it does need similarly compelling data and characters to weave a story that captures the country’s attention.

National Media Coverage Is No Accident for Nonprofits

Credit: SKR

Of course any nonprofit would want national news coverage, and all that goes with it — credibility, respect, attention from donors, a voice on a larger stage. But to get that coverage they have to earn it, and to earn it they need a strategy (or a firm that knows how to create and execute a national earned media strategy).

To get national coverage, some of the steps a nonprofit could take include:

  • Offering a story — with characters, relevance and solutions to problems — rather than a mere announcement

  • Doing work on a problem that affects people across the country

  • Working on issues that are timely and in the public’s mind

  • Having data to validate their results

There’s more to it than that, of course, but earning national coverage rarely happens with a wish and a wave of the hand.

To land that coveted national feature, your PR team needs you to keep an open mind. Media Supervisor Zach Halper shares that flexibility is one of the most important aspects of a big story:

“Sometimes the story you want to tell is not the one a journalist wants… Don’t get too attached to your own ideas. Chances are you are going to have to change course. Also, remember: PR firms can only pitch the story. We can’t control what the journalist wants to do with it.”

Read more in his blog.