Product update: manage your Spokespeople, showcase events, and send branded emails.

It's been a busy summer over at pr.co; our whole team has switched to remote work, so we have had to develop a new modus operandi to get features out the door.

Our plan for 2020 is to continue our developments for the new branded layout, and to roll out new updates. The introduction of the layout is part of a much broader roadmap. Today we're introducing the next round of updates.

It has been a while since our last spokespeople management update on the pr.co platform. We've seen our users slowly adapting to the feature; with larger organisations requesting more flexibility, agencies looking to have more fine-grained control over spokesperson placement, and power-users wanting more personal information to be stored with a spokesperson.

For this we've completely redesigned the way pr.co users manage spokespeople, allowing them to build a complete profile.

Here are the main spokesperson features, which give you greater control for where a spokesperson sits in a newsroom:

1. The new 'Automatically preselect in new campaigns' feature. This marks a person as the default contact person for all future campaigns.

2. The 'Don't show in public newsroom' option. This is for those of you who may have a different spokesperson for different topics (here's looking at you agencies). This checkbox hides that person from newsroom unless specifically selected for a campaign. This is ideal for situations like partnership announcements, specific topic, etc.

2. The 'Spokesperson for a specific press release' feature- which does what it says on the tin. That way, you can for instance select your CFO as a spokesperson on financial press statements. Here's an example of what that looks like:

The timing for this feature couldn't be more ironic. Right when conferences, corporate events, trade shows, and physical press events ground to a halt; we were done working on our new Events-feature. With it, you can inform your newsroom visitors of upcoming press events, announcements, reports, annual figures, and luckily: online events.

Adding an event to your newsroom is simple, all you have to do is fill in the name, description, start/end- date, location, and a URL for attendees to sign up if needed. The newsroom will then show these events in clever places, like on the homepage and around press releases, but also on its own dedicated events page.

We’ve been working hard on beautifully branded newsrooms, and now we have the equally beautiful emails to match. This means all emails sent to your newsroom subscribers will be branded with your company colour, logo, fonts, and matching header style.

Here's an example from the Swapfiets newsroom:

Whilst these are not rolled out to everyone yet, the branded distribution emails will be coming to you soon. Historically, pr.co users had two choices with email templates:

1. Choose our plain-text template to make the emails you send feel like a regular, personal email.
2. Choose a custom email template, where we sit down with you and design the perfect email template. This was usually fully branded, and had more of a newsletter-y feel to it.

Previously you had to choose one of the two, which could be tricky as every campaign requires a different approach. For example, a very personalised approach to a select group of journalists would probably benefit from a plain text email, that gets straight to the point. While a big announcement going to a broader audience like stakeholders, partners, and new journalists would benefit from a more branded approach.

Because of this we're introducing a fully branded distribution email template option, which you can choose alongside the plain text email, so you can choose your weapon of choice. Customers that have a custom email template will still be able to use that template, but can now also choose the other two flavours, so you go from one email template to three 💪

And now for a functionality we're especially excited about: the branded distribution layout will now inform recipients when a campaign is under embargo. Previously, recipients would only find out about this when clicking-through to the newsroom, or when it was clearly stated the email. Now it's an easy-to-use functionality.

Please don't hesitate to ask us any questions, or let us know if you have any feedback on the new functionalities. We're building them to make your life easier.