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Antenna becomes more efficient and effective after adopting Propel

Antenna didn’t have a standardized system for pitching reporters and found using spreadsheets was easy enough, but limiting. Antenna tried Propel and say they’re saving between 3 and 4 hours on each campaign.

Antenna is a full service public relations agency that creates marketing campaigns meant to bring brands long-term success. Antenna focuses on real estate, sustainability, and health care. Director of Media Relations, Isaac Steinmetz, says what he loves about Antenna is the company’s willingness to question best practices and standards when it comes to the PR industry. Antenna has always been open to working with new tools, and according to Isaac, Propel was just the PRM that employees were searching for.

The problem

Before Propel, the Antenna team didn’t have a standardized system for pitching reporters. Using spreadsheets is easy enough, but Isaac wanted to understand -- “what happens after you build a media list?” In his words, the lists turned into a bunch of siloed campaigns, which go out the door and after that, there’s no way to understand what’s going on. Antenna was looking for a CRM and after reviewing companies like Salesforce, found most of them were better suited for business development. Isaac didn’t realize, however, that he was actually looking for a PRM, or a Public Relations Management tool instead of customer relationship management. When he was searching for a solution to help increase efficiency in the workplace, Isaac found that most options were not built for media relations. 


The solution

After looking into the platform, Antenna realized Propel would rescue the team from relying on spreadsheets and would enable them to centralize all their data for pitching. With Propel, Isaac was able to immediately see which team members were responsible for pitching which journalists, who had the best open and response rates and which campaigns were getting results. These metrics also helped them understand which journalists engage with their firm. Having the information on which team member has the best relationship with a specific journalist can help a campaign become more effective and save lots of time in the process. Propel’s live dashboards make all of the data visible and save team leaders time. They no longer need to curate homemade reports. They can instead, export the data from the live dashboards and send that off to higher-ups or clients. This specifically helped them communicate results with their clients. It wasn’t long before Antenna decided that Propel was “changing the processes” for the better and wanted it to be the standard for every team.


The results

Today, the Antenna team reports they shave off three to four hours of time from any campaign by using Propel. The media outreach process has helped centralize and organize contacts, which ultimately creates accountability for team members. Being able to see which journalists engaged with a pitch and from which team member the pitch came from offers an opportunity for managers to see what’s working in a campaign. Antenna never before had a tool to track the engagement in terms of open rates and response rates to pitches. This type of intelligence was a game-changer. Previously, it was the norm for PR office spaces to include shouting from team member to team member trying to confirm who had spoken with a journalist to avoid double pitching. Sound familiar? Instead of raising your voice or phoning a friend, any team member can take a quick look at the Propel journalist database and immediately see when he or she had been last pitched, by whom and what the result was. This, of course, saves time and increases visibility regarding any and all communications from the Antenna agency to outlets they work with. 


Not only does Propel shave off hours of pitching time, but it helps Antenna have better relationships with their colleagues in journalism. Notes about what topics journalists are interested in and how they want to be pitched are saved in the system for every team member to see. With all of that time saved on manual research, Antenna teams are now focusing their energy on the more meaningful parts of PR -- like building a campaign, spending time with a client, fostering a new relationship, and being creative. In their words, Propel has made the company “more efficient and more effective.”


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