RISU Organizes 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” will be held. The course is organized by RISU.

“External communication for religious organizations” is a new training project within the framework of the PR School of RISU. http://old.risu.org.ua/ukr/contacts/editorialnews/article;26116 Its main purpose is to help churches and religious organizations to 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 as part of 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 the RISU work, the PR School is aimed at Ukrainian churches and religious organizations, which are our main partners in the work of covering 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 journalist 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.  

The course is conducted by practicing journalists and specialists in the fields of secular and religious PR:

Svitlana Babynska – PR manager of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies of UCU http://ecumenicalstudies.org.ua/ukr/

Yulia Zavadska – deputy chief editor of the Catholic social-religious magazine CREDO http://www.credo-ua.org/

Olena Kulyhina – editor of the Russian-language version of RISU http://risu.org.ua/ua/index

Otar Dovzhenko – media expert, “TV criticism” Telekrytyka http://www.telekritika.ua/

Mariana Karapinka – specialist on communications, Promova http://promova.com.ua/

For more detailed information on the seminar’s program and for registration, please write to: [email protected]

Participants are expected to register by February 25.