Case Study: Cut out Busy-Work for Strategic Priorities
20+
Hours Freed Up Per Week
3,500
Media Interactions Logged
50%
Of Missing Work Captured
Background
The University of Calgary is one of Canada’s largest universities with five campuses and over 37,000 students. The central media and issues team of six members, in coordination with communicators across the university’s 14 faculties, fields dozens of media enquiries per week.
U of C positions itself as the school for innovators and entrepreneurs.
Challenge
With no central platform to capture and manage communications, the team was inundated with busy-work and couldn’t focus on driving the strategic message of entrepreneurship. The specific challenges were:
- Time wasted looking for past messaging and journalist contacts
- Limited visibility of faculty responses and so didn’t know how well they were executing on strategic messaging
- Could not easily demonstrate their work to stakeholders
Why Broadsight was the Solution
Broadsight gave U of C a central database where all communications with journalists are captured automatically with AI to save time on data entry. They can now instantly find past interactions and messaging and, with 40 seats across the school and a tool that captures work that Meltwater can’t, they have full visibility of what faculty communicators are doing.
Organizational Impact
Having all the communication data at their fingertips and clarity on who is handling each part of the team’s files has saved hours of searching, typing and duplicated work. Broadsight has also enabled U of C to see what portion of enquiries relate to their strategic messaging on entrepreneurship. They now report on the 40-50% of work they were previously missing with granular metrics. “Broadsight has helped us save time and money and we couldn’t be happier.”
Unifying systems was the key
“The analytics have given us a real-time view into how our media relations efforts align with our university’s strategic priorities, while providing us with additional insights to adjust our media approach and maximize earned media coverage.”
Dean Parthenis, Director
Media & Issues Management
University of Calgary
