The Power of Collaboration in Media Relations
As media relations leaders, we all know the value of teamwork and collaboration. But let’s face it: Coordinating and sharing information among our team members and across different institutions can be a real challenge. Indeed, the bigger organizations become, the more difficult successful coordination becomes.
Over the past three years, I’ve spoken with over 100 media relations leaders and staff members about how they coordinate, collaborate and respond on issues. Ninety per cent of them use some variation of Excel or Google Sheets. A very small percentage have built out a system to distill basic metrics using Microsoft OneNote. And then there’s the folks who are trying to make it work with a shared inbox and shared drive.
These methods tend to be low-cost and simple for users to feed in. But for larger organizations with more than five staff (let alone big entities with over 10 or more staff feeding in both proactive and reactive media hits, it just gets too complicated. Particularly when you layer in sensitive requests which can have significant reputational impacts, using a simple Excel sheet may feel increasingly facile and insufficiently secure for such important information.
That’s where Broadsight Tracker comes in. At our university we have over 12 staff handling media enquiries and issues-management requests on any given day. Many of our staff are decentralized within different faculties who have their own media teams. When COVID struck, we saw a 200-per-cent increase in media enquiries and statements as the university moved to remote working.
We knew we needed something more powerful to help in our day-to-day media relations services.
It was with this in mind that we’ve spent the past two years creating a first-of-its-kind, game-changing collaboration CRM customized explicitly for media relations and issues communicators.
The idea from the start was to create a single platform where your entire media relations team can share and access crucial information in real time. No more digging through emails or juggling multiple tools to stay on top of everything.
With Broadsight Tracker, teams can finally wave goodbye to those old-school approaches and embrace a more efficient and streamlined way of working.
As some of our customers have already remarked, “It’s like you’ve taken all the ways we track and show impact of work and put them all in one place.”
- Share your media lists, expert contact lists, and the interactions you’ve had with various journalists.
- Create a more organized and easily searchable system for issues management to ensure you aren’t constantly reinventing the wheel when it comes to issues notes and statements.
- Log the services you and your team provide every day to highlight the invisible work you do that’s critical, but for which you rarely get credit.
That was the goal. After five years of work, we’ve got a tool we’re very proud of. Feel like this might help your situation? Reach out and we’d love to have a chat.
