Cooperate with media: They may seem intrusive and they may be annoying, but they can broadcast the image and circumstances surrounding your child’s disappearance to more people with 30 seconds on the evening news than you will reach by nailing flyers to telephone poles for a hundred years. They may ask insensitive questions and seem totally out of depth, but over the long term they are invaluable.

Some missing child cases are not quickly resolved and may continue for weeks, months, years or sadly, never get resolved at all. In order to stimulate a decisive, effective long-term investigation you need pro-active public support. If the community is allowed to forget and the case is filed in faded memory, law enforcement can scale back their efforts and the likelihood of a successful recovery diminishes significantly.

The most effective way of acquiring and maintaining support is by investing the public in your child’s welfare. Radio, television and newspapers offer unprecedented opportunity to humanizing your child thereby emotionally linking society to the outcome of the investigation.

In order to create coherent and relevant media strategies, you should understand the fundamental differences between the three major journalistic categories: radio, television and print. Radio is the most mobile of the three, offering immediacy. Since so many people riding in cars listen to the radio it is particularly useful in pressing emergencies like missing child cases. Television, present in 93 percent of American homes, brings the images that so often shape and form human emotion into our living rooms. We can see photographs and video clips of the child so desperately sought. Print media, the most rigid of the three, presents important details and offers thoughtful analysis. Newspapers and magazines fill the gaps, deepen our understanding and allow us to formulate informed and comprehensive perspectives.

You cannot purchase the kind of publicity that the media can provide at no cost, so as difficult as it might seem you have to press forward through your fear. If a reporter asks an insensitive question or promotes an uninformed theory, take a deep breath and press your case. Remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity during the first twenty-four hours of a kidnapping if your child is disappearing at the rate of one mile per minute.

Maximizing Opportunities
Encourage non-traditional yet powerful partnerships between family, community, business, media and law enforcement as a means of extending publicity surrounding the mystery of the missing child. Create a strategic foundation that will systematically extend the public’s interest for as long as is necessary to resolve the case. You want to drive the publicity surrounding the disappearance by humanizing the victim thereby emotionally investing society’s interest in the outcome of the investigation.

• Pursue an immediate short-term strategy focused on the first several days after the event that will encourage consistent, daily media participation (10 day plan).
  
• In order to maintain a long-term focus on the missing child, begin preparing a series of events that can be introduced in logical intervals over several weeks (6 week plan).
  
• Create strategies that target specific demographics within your community so that they can become active participants in the recovery effort ( City Council Wish List).