In conversation with Peter De Meyer of University of Antwerp
"Smart.pr is our back office"
Smart.pr has been available in Belgium since 2019. In addition to the online software with which we are the market leader in the Netherlands, we also offer a database of more than 4 thousand Belgian journalists. Peter De Meyer of the University of Antwerp was one of the first customers. Because we were curious to see how he liked it, we decided to seek him out for an interview. It turned into a nice conversation about public relations, software and underwear....
Can you tell us briefly about your work?
After eight superbly exciting years in newspaper journalism, I moved to "the other side" in 2010 and started working as a press officer at the University of Antwerp. Soon the job of spokesperson was added.
As a spokesperson, I want to get the mountain of information out through the right channels and reach the right audience with it. This is done through social media, but also certainly by sending out press releases. The traditional media is still very important in this and press coverage is a channel to bring the news to the right people.
As an educational institution offering high-level education, it is important to be present and visible. In addition to education, the University of Antwerp also conducts scientific research, which we naturally want to share with the outside world. I keep myself busy with that every day.
Peter de Meyer of the University of Antwerp
"Journalists change jobs faster than they change their underwear, so to speak; keeping up with it then is difficult to do all by themselves."
How did you maintain university press relations before you started Smart.pr?
Previously, we worked with Outlook and Excel. The biggest problem was actually that through Outlook you had to keep track of a lot of work yourself. This was quite often an annoyance.
We also kept press lists in Excel, but that quickly lost its overview. There was never really time to update the lists or invest in finding new contacts. The lists themselves had been collected over the years, but there wasn't really a policy for it.
How's that going now?
Smart.pr is now our back office. Those lists have been imported into our address book in Smart.pr. There, the lists are now securely stored and conveniently organized. Some of those contacts are now also automatically maintained by Smart.pr. Smart.pr takes a lot of work out of our hands.
With Smart.pr, you also have insight into the error messages. Previously, these were not immediately visible, or you received 20 or 30 error messages in your inbox, but there was no time to replace the mail addresses.
The media world changes constantly and a lot. Journalists change jobs faster than they change their underwear, so to speak, so keeping track is difficult to do all by yourself.
How did you send out press releases before?
Previously, we worked with "regular mail." That is, we sent press releases via Outlook, without too much formatting. In Outlook, it is much more difficult to format a message nicely by including a photo or clips, for example. For the university, it is important that our messages look professional and that it is nicely finished. Smart.pr's software helps us with this.
In what ways does Smart.pr help with this?
With Smart.pr, formatting a message is much less error-prone, it takes us less time and it looks nicer.
In addition, we can include photos and short videos. This adds value to the press release, which again is cool. If you enclose a good photo, it is used directly by the media. This works for us and this way we can influence our own appearance.
Our goal now is to send out the best possible message, instead of when it used to be just about putting out a press release because we had to.
With the data from the campaigns sent out, you can make improvements again. For example, we use the data as an argument to choose whether or not to send out a press release about a certain topic. Earlier we did that on gut feeling. It also allows us to see trends and respond to them better. For example, in what period are press releases opened more?
How do you like working with our journalist database?
We can now write to very specific journalists. In addition to science and culture, we now know how to generate attention for specific chairs like animal rights and animal welfare, for example. Now we can approach the right journalists in a very targeted way. For example, in Press Filter we found 106 journalists who write about animal welfare. Before, we would not have been able to find a lot of these journalists.
We also have access to journalists' own mailboxes, instead of just editors. Another example is our publication on heritage (statues and old paintings). Personally, I do not know any journalist within conservation techniques, but in Smart.pr I could easily find 28 who work with heritage restoration. Our post was immediately picked up by a specialized Dutch website.
By working with Smart.pr, we have a wider range of journalists we can reach. In the old workflow we already had a pretty good reach among Flemish journalists, but now Dutch journalists have been added. We have made huge progress in the Dutch market and have added a network of a few thousand journalists. Very interesting for us because many Dutch students come to Antwerp. That extra reach in the Dutch media is very nice.
Would you recommend Smart.pr to other organizations?
Sure. The software makes drafting and sending out press releases to the right people easier. When, like us at the University of Antwerp, you send out press releases on very varied topics, you can take maximum advantage of the numerous keywords in the journalist database.
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