SURVEY: 55% of public relations pros still use spreadsheets to manage contacts

To rev up support for Prezly’s Global PR Survey 2020, they’ve teased out some of the current findings to show the current state of public relations professionals workflow habits.

With all of the technology and services at our disposal, early results show a whopping 55% of pros still rely on spreadsheets to manage media and contact lists and/or transfer contacts to a spreadsheet from another service. It implies that the majority still want control over their assets as much of it becomes proprietary. Current process requires manual updates annually and can become time consuming and costly — but may be worthwhile, especially to small firms who rely heavily on their outreach lists.

Manual is the name of the game. Not only do professionals continue to mostly work from spreadsheets, the best research for media, influencers and other industry contacts comes from doing it yourself. Buying media lists was the lowest ranking at 9% with 83% thus far reporting in and listing “manual research” as the number one tool in their research arsenal.

Typically manual research implies professionals are doing a combination of things: keeping up-to-date with what reporters are writing about, alerts set up on a social channels, monitoring key industry titles and simply using social media to identify and connect with potential media who may be interested in a story. All said, manual implies “real,” and there’s no price tag for that.

The 2020 survey itself focuses heavily on questions related to PR pain points, like, “building a contact database from scratch,” and “following up with unresponsive contacts.” The survey forces you to think about what a meaningful and reciprocal relationship looks like with media contacts and where you may currently fall short and what your future goals are. If you are looking for a public relations firm in Seattle keep this in mind and look for one that is making the best use of their technology.

Then they dig into what it means to have great relationships with media. While these are built over time and through reliability and credibility, it seems, based on the line of questioning that the sheer ability to simply be “seen” by media is something PRs continue to struggle with.

The Prezly team plans to announce their findings from the survey on April 30 and will share visual representations of responses, key findings and insights from their executive leadership.

If you work in public relations and would like to take the survey before it closes on April 27, click here.