Help a Reporter Out (HARO), discontinued vs. Prezly

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) was (and today, HERO is) an incredibly valuable tool that effectively bridges the gap between journalists and PR practitioners, and it filled a need on both ends. A perfect solution to an ongoing industry problem. When I have a client that needs media coverage, and a lead is shared in the daily email that fits the client's expertise, it creates an opportunity that we may never have otherwise been able to identify.

Incentivized

Since this platform is so easy to use when creating or managing communication workflows, it is recommended to work mostly with scenarios that generally require several processes to complete each group management, for example, to cover from the follow-up of employees within the communications team to the management of the team's communication processes.

Incentivized

• Pushes PR opportunities right to your desktop several times a day
• Provides media opportunities for just about every industry and if you monitor it regularly, on just about every topic you can think of
• Provides an easy way to contact reporters with relevant information
• Media outlets are verified for you

Incentivized

• Organized Contacts / Contact Management
• Engagement Tracking
• CRM

Incentivized

• I've noticed that some queries are incredibly vague to the point where they could or could not apply to me. I feel like they should implement more strict parameters on what the query has to include.
• Sometimes the outlet is marked anonymous which is not beneficial at all to those who are browsing queries. I think the outlet should be required as that is a pretty essential piece of information to consider.
• I think they email slightly too often. My inbox gets flooded with HARO emails and I'm not able to go through all of them because they get buried. Maybe explore a new strategy to organize the huge amount of queries that get submitted every day.

Incentivized

• Prezly's platform tends to constantly present slowness issues if you are going to work with external flows coming from other platforms, usually while they are loading, or it can lead to the platform itself stopping its use. Our recommendation to deal with this is to simply copy the workflows inside Prezly, without using the original formats.

Incentivized

It takes only a few minutes to set up your account. Then, the rest is just checking the push emails, and responding to relevant queries.

Incentivized

They are different tools. While HARO pretty much gives you feedback on media opportunities you can pitch for and allows you to get in touch with the reporter, so you can get exposure and they can find people for their news. Cision allows you to syndicate your press releases. You need to have a written press release in order to use it.

Incentivized

It's been a while since I evaluated Prezly against Cision. It's an apples-to-oranges comparison because Cision has a lot of additional features, but Prezly has a robust CRM platform and digital newsroom that outflanks the Cision newsroom in look, feel and ease of use, not to mention cost. It has been several years since I did the comparison, so the Cision offerings may have changed in the meantime, to be fair.

Incentivized

• A hard thing to measure in terms of actual sales dollars, however, being able to provide fresh content is essential to any brand. When someone mentions they saw the published piece or it grows organically from social media, that is a win.

Incentivized

• The biggest ROI is in time saved. when sending press releases before Prezly, I used merge emails in Outlook. It took 3-5 hours to refine my list, set up the outlook page, host links of assets, and then run test sends. Prezly can be set up and a release or distribution sent out in 1-2 hours (even less if we copy a previous set up).
• Prezly makes my website press room look amazing. Many media comment on the Prezly press kits I send along and appreciate that the pages are clean, easy to navigate and reliable.
• It is essential to have a contact management system with an opt-out.

Incentivized