The challenges facing PR and communications professionals have only continued to increase in light of continuing media layoffs and a changing media landscape. Yet, despite this monumental shift, the tools and technology available to assist these professionals have not kept pace at the same rate as those in marketing. Many people in communications still use simple Excel spreadsheets and mail merges to manage their campaigns.
These outdated tactics mean that people in PR are essentially operating in the dark. Without the tools to provide them with a full understanding of the impact of their results—from individual performance metrics to journalist pitch preferences to business outcomes—communications professionals are unable to gain an understanding of what works and why something is falling flat and, therefore, are unable to create and implement the best strategies for their organizations.
Propel PRM
To fix these problems, Zach Cutler founded Propel. As a former PR agency owner, he couldn’t find any technological PRM solutions that fully suited his needs. Therefore, he sold his agency and founded Propel in 2019 to bring the PR industry into the 21st century.
Propel released its newest iteration – Propel 2.0 – to the public in February 2024 to make this technological transition even easier for people in communications.
The AI
One of Propel’s key aspects since its founding has been its AI. Developed by its in-house team of AI engineers, Propel’s Artificial Media Intelligence (AMI) is trained on a continuously updating proprietary dataset of over 5 million pitches and press releases. This enables the algorithm to constantly learn the evolving best practices behind what works in pitching.
The genAI aspect of the AMI, called Artificial Media Intelligence Generator and Assistant (AMIGA), includes a pitch and press release drafter who knows how to write using the optimal pitch and press release length and structure.
Meanwhile, the AMI itself discovers which pitch subjects journalists are most likely to respond to, understands what day and time a journalist is most likely to respond to a pitch, and crawls through a massive database of over 1 billion articles for quick and accurate media monitoring. Here’s my media search result:
Coupled with the only widget for Gmail and Outlook in the industry, Propel anonymizes and aggregates pitch and press release data to understand what works and what doesn’t—including everything from subject line and pitch length to open and response rates. This data is all fed into the proprietary dataset, which is used to further train the AMI.
The AMI also powers Propel PitchBooster, a feature within the Gmail and Outlook widgets that automatically sends pitches on the day and time a journalist is most likely to open their emails, as well as the genAI pitch and press release drafters. Because these drafters are in the email widget itself, PR pros can have a draft of a personalized pitch to a journalist in seconds.
Another unique feature of the Propel platform is its journalist database. The database is the most complete and accurate in the industry and is significantly larger and more comprehensive than its predecessors. It’s also the only PR journalist database in the world that uses Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback to further refine itself as it searches through billions of articles and nearly half a million journalists, podcasters, bloggers, and influencers.
Because of this constant self-improvement, when a prompt such as a pitch or keywords are inputted, the algorithm can provide the PR professional with an accurate list of relevant journalists they can pitch, saving them time and increasing the likelihood of an organization making it into the news cycle.
The CRM
Beyond Propel’s AMI and massive journalist database, it also features a CRM created for the PR industry. As opposed to having hundreds of separate spreadsheets full of difficult-to-search journalist emails and unorganized notes on different journalists, the CRM enables PR pros to manage all their campaigns, media lists, and contacts in one central dashboard. From this central location, a manager can see who pitched which member of the media, who on the team has the best relationship with each media person, as well as notes on all the different journalists.
Propel also has a built-in kanban-style dashboard called a Story Funnel. This enables everyone on the team to see the progression of a campaign from pitch to publish per each journalist. With one glance, anyone on a team can understand how a campaign is progressing without sifting through hundreds of emails or notes in spreadsheets.
Media Monitoring
One of the most important responsibilities of a PR professional is knowing when and where a story on the organization they represent is published. However, with many in the industry still relying on inaccurate search engines that might not capture stories behind paywalls, people in communications tend to miss stories their organizations were mentioned in.
However, with Propel’s comprehensive media monitoring capabilities, PR professionals have a much easier time finding and discovering the stories in which their organizations are mentioned. Propel partners with LexisNexis and its database of over 1 billion articles. Propel’s AMI can search through this constantly updating database to find coverage mentioning organizations across various platforms without the need for manual searches.
The AMI can also recognize whether an article talks about the organization in a positive, negative, or neutral light, enabling PR professionals to gauge the public’s perception of their organization and course correctly before a reputation can be tarnished.
In addition, the dashboard can track several key performance indicators, such as share of voice and other volume metrics, to understand how the organization performs in the media compared to its competition.
PR Business Outcomes
One of PR professionals’ biggest challenges is proving their value to organizations. After all, who’s to say how much revenue a story in a major or trade publication brings in? While it’s possible to estimate how many people visit a particular website every month or how much being published on a particular website will improve an SEO score, most organizations want to know the actual ROI of a particular marketing or PR campaign.
This has been nearly impossible for PR pros to do—until now. Propel’s Business Outcomes dashboard can show the ROI of a particular piece of coverage. It uses direct attribution and general correlation metrics to connect web traffic and PR.
The Propel algorithm determines business outcomes by measuring the average monthly viewerships of outlets where articles are published and backlink clicks to see how many people are coming to an organization’s website directly from a piece of coverage.
The platform also shows the correlation between site visits and when a particular coverage was published. Using these numbers, it’s then possible to correlate how many people enter a sales funnel from a particular campaign or piece of coverage and, therefore, possible to get an accurate estimate of the ROI resulting from the actions of a PR pro.
Propel PRM aims to bring the PR industry into the 21st century with a suite of tools that streamlines every aspect of PR – from pitch to publish – to enable people in communications to focus more on the core aspects of their work; strategizing and journalist relations. And with its new platform, PR is easier – and more effective – than ever before.
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Originally Published on Martech Zone: Propel: Bringing Deep Learning AI to Public Relations Management