🥳 GOSKILLS TURNS 10: Get 10 days of free access with code 10YEARS

GoSkills
Help Sign up Share
Back to course

Learn from Other People’s Mistakes – The Boilerplate

Compact player layout Large player layout

Locked lesson.

Upgrade

  • Lesson resourcesResources
  • Quick referenceReference
  • Transcript
  • Notes

About this lesson

If written appropriately, the boilerplate has potential for both branding and marketing your company.

Exercise files

Download this lesson’s related exercise files.

Learn from Other People’s Mistakes – The Boilerplate.docx
60.8 KB
Learn from Other People’s Mistakes – The Boilerplate - Solution.docx
61 KB

Quick reference

Learn from Other People’s Mistakes – The Boilerplate

If written appropriately, the boilerplate has both a branding and a marketing potential.

When to use

When writing the boilerplate of a press release.

Instructions

When reading the boilerplate, people must be able to answer the 3 questions below satisfactorily:

  1. What does this company do?
  2. Do they offer a service or sell a product?
  3. Who would be interested in their services or products?

Here are a few suggestions to write a good boilerplate:

  • The language should not assume industry specific knowledge (jargon) otherwise the uninformed reader might not be able to understand what a company does.
  • The description of what the company does should be easy to understand.
  • Open the boilerplate with the name of your company followed by a clear and brief description of what your company does (e.g. “GoSkills is an online learning platform…”).
Login to download
  • 00:03 Great.
  • 00:05 Let's see if we can keep learning from other people's mistakes.
  • 00:08 And this time, we're going to have a look at the boilerplate.
  • 00:11 The boilerplate has both a branding and
  • 00:13 a marketing potential if we can write it appropriately.
  • 00:17 Let's consider this example.
  • 00:22 Here we've got three questions that will tell us whether a boilerplate is well
  • 00:26 written.
  • 00:27 Number one, what does the company do?
  • 00:29 Number two, do they offer a service or sell a product?
  • 00:33 And number three, who would be interested in their service or product.
  • 00:37 So take a moment now and read the example of the boilerplate below and try and
  • 00:42 answer these three questions.
  • 00:44 You can pause the lesson and when you're ready
  • 00:46 you can continue with the lesson to find out what the answers were.
  • 00:53 Great, so the explanation of the Boilerplate now,
  • 00:56 the boilerplate here assumes that there's industry-specific knowledge
  • 01:02 that the uninformed reader might not understand what ONVIA does.
  • 01:06 So bear in mind that not all journalists and
  • 01:09 editors who come across this press release will have industry specific knowledge.
  • 01:14 So therefore you should attempt to write as clearly as possible and
  • 01:18 to provide an easy to understand description without any jargon.
  • 01:23 Now you might consider preparing two different boilerplates.
  • 01:27 One for knowledgeable readers which you will use when submitting your release to
  • 01:32 field specific publishers.
  • 01:34 And then another one containing a layman explanation for
  • 01:38 people who come across our press release on the website.
  • 01:41 The boilerplate should also be concise.
  • 01:44 It's good to keep it between 50 and 100 words long.
  • 01:48 If the boilerplate is longer than that it would be disproportionate
  • 01:53 compared to the average length of the press release itself.
  • 01:57 So what does ONVIA do?
  • 01:59 After checking on their website I found out that ONVIA is a company that
  • 02:03 provides intelligence for winning more government business.
  • 02:07 Now this sentence clearly describes what ONVIA does and
  • 02:11 who might be interested in their services.
  • 02:14 For example, building societies, engineers, architect, security and
  • 02:17 so forth.
  • 02:18 This message should be clearly conveyed,
  • 02:21 somewhere at the beginning of the boilerplate.
  • 02:24 For example you could say that ONVIA is a company that offers
  • 02:29 insights about government bids.
  • 02:31 Other companies might be easier to describe.
  • 02:33 For example GoSkills is an online learning platform.
  • 02:38 So make sure that you can provide an easy to understand explanation of your company.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.

Learn from Other People’s Mistakes – The Headline
02m:40s
Effective Crisis Management
04m:18s
Share this lesson and earn rewards

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp Email

Gift this course
Give feedback

How is your GoSkills experience?

I need help

Your feedback has been sent

Thank you

Back to the top

© 2023 GoSkills Ltd. Skills for career advancement