Agility PR Solutions is a media monitoring and analysis platform for public relations management, and a subsidiary of Innodata. The product was originally PR Newswire Agility, which was divested to MediaMiser, a subsidiary of Innodata, then rebranded as Agility PR Solutions.
Agility PR Solutions is well-suited to finding mentions for a large number of keywords and keeping them organized. As a membership association, this is perfect for us because we are able to track all of our members. We are also able to use it to find up-to-date reporter contacts in the right areas for our media pitches and press releases for both ourselves and members. Scenarios where Agility PR Solutions is not well suited... I haven't really found any yet. I anticipate that if you expected the software to do everything for you, then maybe that would be a problem.
PR Newswire is well suited for organizations with a significant public relations budget that want to quickly disseminate a news release over the wire to a specific targeted group of recipients. It's probably not a suitable solution for smaller companies or "boutique" public relations agency unless the distribution cost is to be directly passed on to the client because it is quite expensive.
I think PR Newswire's reach is very good. It's a well-known service that's been around a long time and has a solid reputation. You can trust it.
I think PR Newswire helps increase the visibility of news. So although I would also recommend pitching the news, using a wire service, particularly when there's major news to announce, can help in spreading the word.
It's pretty easy to use. You may need someone to walk you through it at first, but you can save distributions and so forth so that it gets easier over time.
There is a lot of stuff you can do on the website, and it can be challenging to find what you need without asking customer service for help. I'm a person who likes to do things for myself.
Sometimes I wish that more of their features were just a part of what was available instead of an upsell. I want to use everything but can afford it.
I feel like they upgrade a lot which is great but at the same time, changing the feeling of things makes it feel less familiar.
PR Newswire is an industry leader and gives the user the ability to send out a press release, to a wide audience, very quickly and easily. The pricing is on par with other companies (perhaps they are a bit higher) but they do send useful "visibility" reports after a release is distributed, which is helpful when trying to explain ROI to C suite leaders. You also can email or fax your own distribution list, which is helpful and reduces the need for a media monitoring service
Honestly this is probably the absolute worst part of the company. I had maybe 5 different emails from 5 different people when attempting to use this service, and I never knew who my account manager was and who the other people were.
PR Newswire is considered one of the two gold standard newswire services because of its wide reach and high quality reporting. Pricing is almost identical to its biggest competitor, Business Wire, so it winds up being a matter of preference and ease more than anything. We actually made the decision to move our business away from PR Newswire due to their growing desire to have editorial oversight over the news we're distributing on behalf of clients.
We love to be able to share member news, so Agility PR Solutions enables us to do just that. Better! This improves our member engagement, which then improves retention.
We are a funded EDA Tech Hub. I use Agility PR Solutions to track both mentions for ourselves so we can share them with the EDA which is important for ratings, but also to track what the other hubs are doing.
Agility PR Solutions has had an impact on our media relations because I can now send out a media advisory about a press release to a targeted list instead of just putting out a press release that might never reach anyone.
ROI is difficult to calculate in my company's specific industry, but we do know our visibility has increased when we send out a release via PR Newswire.
We send out a relatively small number of press releases a year, so we know when we send out a report if our target audience is receiving it.
With Google and other search engines being the primary way people research information about company's today, we know that when we do a press release via PR Newswire that release will "live" indefinitely on the web, so we know our press release will go much further than the initial distribution.
