January 5, 2024
A day in the life of a Public Relations agent is dynamic and fast paced, characterized by a mix of strategic planning, communication management, and relationship building. Their work involves critical thinking, excellent communication skills, effective damage control, and the ability to navigate a diverse array of tasks to promote and protect the image of their clients.
A platform like Swit can make a PR agent’s job smoother and less stressful by streamlining your workflow, contextualizing conversations with relevant history, providing daily checklists and reminders, and consolidating contacts and correspondence.
As a PR agency working on a new campaign for a client, you will need to reach out to journalists, bloggers, and influencers to secure media coverage. This process involves identifying relevant contacts, crafting compelling pitches, and maintaining positive relationships with media professionals.
Swit can streamline these tasks and improve the efficiency of media outreach and relationship management
PR Workflows Using Swit
Swit is the definitive Work OS, offering effective collaboration features that fit every workflow. It brings people and teams together with tools that support communication, work management, task tracking and analysis, goal alignment, and more!
Swit plans can be customized to meet the needs of any organization of any size. As a collaboration tool, Swit is the perfect choice for an industry like public relations, where projects are high-speed and time-sensitive.
Contact Management
Cultivating relationships and developing media contacts lay the groundwork for all other PR activities. Using Swit integrations like Google Sheets, you can create a centralized database to consolidate and manage your media contacts and share it to channels or attach it to task cards. These contacts can be categorized based on their beat, publication, or influence level.
This will also give your firm the flexibility to add only as much information as needed. Important data such as email addresses, phone numbers, and recent interactions can be linked to each contact so that all PR agents are in the loop.
Pitch Collaboration
As a collaboration tool, Swit bridges the gap between project management and team communication. Features such as file sharing, task card customization, and group and team tags allow PR teams to work together on crafting pitches and press releases. Team members can provide feedback, suggest edits, and finalize the pitch document collaboratively.
Task Assignment
Task cards can have multiple assignees, collaborators, and attachments. Deadlines and priority levels serve as a guide for how each task fits into the overall project timeline. Checklist items can be assigned to individual members along with due dates, so it’s clear what needs to be tackled first.
This gives managers the ability to delegate specific media outreach tasks to team members. For example, one person might be responsible for drafting pitches, another for making follow-up calls, and another for coordinating interview requests.
Scheduling and Reminders
Your PR agency can use the Google Calendar or Outlook integration to schedule follow-up calls and media interviews. Once you have scheduled them, you will be able to view these events in Swit’s right panel. From that panel, the drop-down menu gives you the option to either attach to an existing task or convert to a new task.
Task cards provide you with reminders of approaching deadlines in your notifications. Priority levels on each task card can be set to keep collaborators in the loop regarding urgency.
Organizing meetings quickly — par for the course for PR agents in damage-control mode — is also a simple matter of a few clicks. Using the Google Calendar integration in the right panel, you can schedule a meeting for a specific date and time, add guests, and send out invites, all from within Swit!
File Sharing
PR agencies often need to share multimedia assets, such as press releases, images, and video clips. Swit enables cross-workspace collaboration, which allows easy file sharing across workspaces, ensuring that media professionals have quick access to the materials they need. For example, if the media outreach workspace needs some brochures made, they can have instant access to design files from the creative workspace.
Analytics and Reporting
Swit’s project dashboard allows your agency to track the progress of any project at a glance. Knowing the number of completed tasks and the number still in progress helps management gauge which projects are draining the most resources. It also helps plan the objectives and goals for the coming quarters.
Any positive feedback received in response to your outreach can be converted to actionable tasks for follow-up meetings or interviews. This allows you to keep track of the interest shown by various media outlets, the status of any pending interviews, and the success rate of pitches.
Permission Controls
The Guests plug-in is an effective tool when a company wants to add a client to the workspace and give them limited access to relevant information.
You can restrict certain workspaces, channels, projects, or documents with sensitive information, such as media contacts or campaigns that have not yet been released. Only authorized team members can view this data, ensuring security and compliance with privacy regulations.
Automation
The Automation plug-in can handle repetitive tasks, so you can save your creative energies for the jobs that require focus. For example, your firm can set an automation process where an incoming email will serve as the trigger to automatically forward it to the client’s channel and also tag the team that works with the client.
Message Logs
If you’re in the market for a Slack alternative, Swit is a one-of-a-kind collaboration software that saves message history for up to a year with the free version, compared to Slack which only saves them for up to 90 days. Paid Swit plans save message history for the lifetime of your account.
Through Swit, your PR firm has long-term access to records of all communications related to each media contact. This is essential for tracking the history of interactions, noting any preferences or feedback, and maintaining a professional relationship with the media.
Flexibility is key, as the PR landscape is ever-evolving, and the agent must adapt strategies to align with current trends and client needs. Swit is the collaboration tool that is seamless, customizable, and versatile enough to adapt to the intense and fast-moving world of public relations. Get in touch today to learn more about how Swit can fit into your workflow.
Nyda Ahmad, Copywriting Manager
