When you purchase an item after clicking a link from this post, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Devin: What is your superpower?
Liz: Well, I think my biggest superpower is magnifying good.
Liz H. Kelly, founder of Goody PR and author of 8-Second PR, says, “We only work with clients who are making a positive impact.”
“We created the new Goody Business Book Awards to honor 100 percent social impact authors making a difference with words,” Liz says. She recently launched the Goody Business Book Awards to recognize the authors whose books help people. Nominations are open through September 30, 2022.
Liz shared a story of one of her biggest PR wins with a social enterprise—an addiction center focused on helping veterans and first responders—to illustrate her mantra, “be patient and persistent and never desperate.”
My biggest I guess win with PR was getting the addiction center I mentioned on the Today Show.
We went through this whole thing for about six months. The interview was actually scheduled in New York. The flights were booked and the Today Show calls and says, sorry, we have to cancel.
The people that I was working with, the spokespeople that were going to be in the interview, they were just devastated. They said, Liz, “What did we do wrong? We're so depressed. We really wanted to do this.”
So I picked up the phone, which took, you know, a lot of confidence, called the producer and basically said, “They're really upset. Can you just give me a little more feedback?”
They said, “Oh, no, it's not them. Please tell them it's not them. We're still interested. We just can't do it right now. So keep us posted if anything changes or anything new comes up.”
So, two months later, we had something new to talk about. I pitched it. They went for it. We all flew to New York. It was a big, big win. It was almost 7 minutes, which is like unheard of on national TV. The PR value was—I got a media report that said it was over $800,000. So that's the biggest number I've seen and we were all so excited.
But if we had not had the confidence to just pick up the phone and then reinvent that story and keep going back to them, even when they were saying no. It would have never happened.
In Liz’s work, she has developed her superpower; she calls it “magnifying good.”
How to Develop Magnifying Good As a Superpower
Liz shares a story of her youth to explain how magnifying good came to define her work:
That really is the motto behind everything we do. A lot of it comes from the heart. When I was young, nine years old, I went to summer camp.
When I went to that summer camp, what I loved about it was it wasn't the person who was the best tennis player or the best in drama in the play that got the big award, it was the people that were a leader and who made other people feel good and helped other people. So they set an example of being a positive light there, and that impression really stuck with me. I went to that camp for eight years. I just kept going back, and that just stayed with me.
One of the keys to magnifying good is finding the stories that make it interesting. She says she asks her clients a never-ending stream of questions to discover the stories that enable compelling pitches to the media and attention-holding accounts on air.
She offers the following tip:
The number one tip that I would give your audience that I do is ask questions and never stop asking and never stop brainstorming. So, what I mean is you want to get on the phone with a client or you want to get in a brainstorming meeting and you want to keep asking, “What makes us different? What is our wow?”
It could go back to childhood. It could go back to a story, whatever it is. You want to dig and keep asking questions.
By following Liz’s example and advice, you can make magnifying good a superpower that will enable you to do more good. Even if you don’t make this your superpower, developing just a bit of this strength could help expand the good you’re already doing.
As a PR Pro, She Magnifies Good