Public
relations is something of a ‘dark art’ –
its effectiveness can be difficult to fathom and should you
get it wrong, you’re likely to alienate those you were
trying to communicate with in the first place.
For charities, a good PR strategy is an essential part of
any campaign and for maintaining a long-term public profile;
limited budgets must be used effectively to generate maximum
press coverage.
Fortunately a range of software tools is available to help
charities run their PR departments more effectively. These
can help with media monitoring, distributing press releases,
evaluation of a campaign or ongoing press coverage, and planning
a future campaign or strategy.
One provider of such software is Durrants, which was established
in 1880 as a provider of press cuttings to the aristocracy.
Since then it has branched out and now provides monitoring,
evaluation services and media planning to charities including
The Samaritans, WWF UK, and the Meningitis Research Foundation.
The company’s Plan CRM system logs all communication
with a journalist, irrespective of office location, and makes
it available for the entire public relations team, thereby
ensuring that everyone is conveying a consistent message.
The Durrants Plan database contains the contact details of
around 450,000 journalists and monitors over 10,000 media
sources, both in the UK and internationally.
“If you click on a journalist’s name, you can
see all the articles that they have written about your organisation
since you’ve had our service,” says Jeremy Thompson,
managing director of Durrants. “Likewise, if you go
in and look at all your articles, you can then see which journalists
are covering your stories, who’s covering them positively,
who negatively, and you can see where you need to focus your
efforts.”
Thompson believes that the market for PR tools and services
is currently consolidating. “Ultimately PR people want
to have a dashboard where they can write a press release,
build a distribution list for their release, send off the
release, monitor the resulting coverage and get the analysis,”
he says.
“The media monitors are getting involved in evaluation
and planning, and the planners are getting involved in monitoring
– everyone recognises that the middle ground is the
place to be. The end user benefits from having integrated
data, and the cost benefit that comes from having everything
in one basket.”
Vocus is another company which supplies a suite of PR tools
that cover media relations, news distribution and news monitoring.
The suite is accessed through a web-browser and is offered
as an annual or multi-year subscription, with press release
distribution offered on a per-transaction basis. It can analyse
media coverage in real-time and provide feedback to the PR
team.
“If you think about it charities are the ultimate consumers
of PR,” says Andrew Muir, managing director of Vocus.
“They want to spread the word about their good causes
and the good results they’re having, but ultimately
they also want to generate interest and donations.”
When a journalist calls a charity’s press office, the
PR officer is able to pull up all contact the charity has
had with that journalist in the past, and at the end of the
conversation they can enter a prompt to make a follow-up call
at a later date. When clippings arrive into the Vocus system,
they are automatically linked to journalists in the database
and the publication that carried it.
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“Over time you’re building up a full history of
every single interaction you’ve ever had with that journalist,”
says Muir, who believes such tools are now essential for any
charity with a substantial PR team. “If you go into
a PR office that doesn’t have something like this, you
tend to see yellow post-it notes stuck on a computer screen,
falling off on to the floor and then leaving on the bottom
of someone’s shoe.”
He claims that his company’s PR services also provide
a good return on investment for charities. “If you look
at the cost of buying a one page advert in a magazine,”
he says, “we’re probably not charging much more
than that for a whole system.”
The system’s analytics software can also produce charts
and graphs from news coverage, industry trends and PR activities,
enabling a charity to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns
and tailor their approach in the future.
“We know exactly what press releases are going out,
who we’re targeting them at, and then obviously once
the coverage comes in, we’re able to track who actually
wrote about it and what messages they got across,” says
Carolan Davidge, head of press at Cancer Research UK, which
uses the Vocus system.
And getting an accurate and detailed picture of the success
or failure of a particular campaign is key for the charity.
“What you ultimately want to do is see how it affects
the bottom line, so in our case whether it brings in more
fundraising, whether it changes people’s attitudes to
how they might reduce their risk of cancer; trying to track
that is almost the more difficult task,” says Davidge.
A media rich world requires up to date PR software if the
different channels through which a message or campaign may
be delivered are to be managed effectively. “In this
day and age where so much happens over the electronic media,
such as blogging and email, you absolutely need to have some
sort of system in place to deal with that,” says Davidge.
Living in a media world
Metrica is one of the largest media analysis and evaluation
companies in operation and have worked with charities including
the British Heart Foundation, NSPCC and Oxfam. Sam Redman,
account director at the company, claims their ConsumerPulse
tool can help charities to better target their PR activities
at a specific audience.
“We run a survey with YouGov asking people about their
lifestyle habits, job, where they shop – all sorts
of things like that, together with information about what
media they consume and how often,” says Redmond. “If
you’re planning for a campaign and want to reach a
particular audience you can build that campaign based on
people’s answers. If you need to know the top five
daily newspapers the audience you’re aiming at read,
you can pull that information together.”
PR analysis tools often use a scoring system to evaluate
press coverage, which is far from ideal according to Redmond.
“You might score a nine one month and eight another,”
she says. “If your score’s gone up or down from
one month to the next, you don’t really know why.
We look at the volume and the tone of coverage, how the
message delivery is going; different aspects are separated
out individually and then you can identify where you may
need to improve, or in fact where things are going well.”
Further support
CharityComms supports communications staff and volunteers
working in large and small charities, non-governmental organisations
and other relevant areas. They operate askCharity, a free
online contacts book for media professionals which enables
them to search hundreds of charities to find information
relevant to what they are writing.
“It’s kind of like a dating service to allow
journalists to get easier access to what journalists have
to offer,” says Joe Saxton, chair of CharityComms
and founder of third sector think tank nfpSynergy. “Rather
than them having to ring up 26 different organisations to
find the right one, they can say, ‘has anyone got
one of these?’ and the charities come back to them
with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer.”
Not all charities have the budget, or indeed the staff,
to make top-end PR software tools a worthwhile investment.
But Saxton believes they should still be pro-active in evaluating
their press coverage. “A lot of people will find that
their web figures will spike in tandem with, or just after,
they’ve had a good bit of media coverage,” he
says. “By making sure that day-by-day they know their
web figures, they can tell what kinds of media are proving
most effective.”
PR software can undoubtedly help charities run their PR
operations in a more efficient and effective manner, but
as Saxton points out: “For all the gizmos, for all
the online technologies and the way that technology is changing
PR, having ten journalists who you’ve built personal
relationships with is always going to be worth its weight
in gold.”
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