Museum M Leuven - How a museum went from spending half a day to just 1 hour on outreach
As custodian of the city of Leuven’s extensive art collection, Museum M appreciates the way in which imagery tells a story. So it makes sense that visual stories are at the core of M’s communication with its stakeholders
The problem was that PR managers Veerle and Annelies were finding it difficult and time consuming to share these stories. That is until they discovered Prezly.
Here's how Veerle and Annelies used Prezly to cut out cumbersome tasks and free up time to focus on what matters: creating and sharing amazing visual stories.
Veerle and Annelies wasted a lot of time gathering assets and selecting contacts.
They often found themselves spending half a day developing each story, first having to find the right people to reach out to, and then managing unwieldy contact lists in Excel.
They also got tripped up in the creative process. Building their stories and sending them out involved a tedious combo of FTP servers, Word documents and Outlook.
For Veerle and Annelies, publishing visual stories so that stakeholders could access them with ease was no simple task. Usually, the process required an FTP server, with the major drawback being that they needed to provide journalists with a login and password to access the information.
But that’s not all. In some cases, they even had to physically share CD-roms (remember those?) with influencers.
"It was hard to process and share all the information journalists needed."
Whenever they could, Veerle and Annelies published stories as email attachments. But the huge file sizes put a strain on the deliverability and user-friendliness of their emails.
Manually scraping Excel lists
Museum M organises a wide range of events and exhibitions. They have different audiences to connect with, who all require different kinds of information.
M’s strategy: create distinct stories for distinct audiences. Provide each stakeholder group with relevant information, a story that resonates on their level. A beautiful approach, but one that was difficult to maintain.
"We used to spend half a day sending emails and building formats that worked."
As Veerle and Annelies stored contact information in Excel files, the greater part of their time went to manually selecting the right people to contact, instead of creating the right stories for those contacts to actually read.
Did the PR efforts pay off?
They may have had a great strategy for sharing Museum M’s stories, but Veerle and Annelies lacked the feedback to really evaluate its effect. This is because they published their stories via emails sent through Outlook, from which gathering valuable information such as open and click rates is impossible.
"Each campaign was tailored to a specific group, but we couldn't see if it made a difference."
In other words: they put a lot of effort into creating tailored content and reaching out to the right people, but couldn’t learn whether or not that strategy actually paid off.
Now Veerle and Annelies have time to create great brand stories.
With Prezly, sharing relevant and attractive content has become super easy. Veerle and Annelies simply upload their images to their stories, straight from their computer. If they want to add a video, all they have to do is provide a link and the video will be embedded for them.
And that ease and user-friendliness goes both ways. Museum M’s stakeholders are no longer having to download large attachments, juggle FTP passwords, or copy CD-roms. Everything they need is presented with the story and can be accessed with just one click.
"Prezly is a very user-friendly and hands-on system. Not only for us, but for our stakeholders as well."
Another major struggle was selecting the right contacts to receive M’s stories.
With Prezly, the problem of wasting valuable hours trawling through Excel lists is firmly in the past. With its built-in system, creating customised lists and selecting the right people is a breeze. In just a few simple steps, Veerle and Annelies can create a beautiful, tailored email campaign and send it to their contacts.
An added benefit of using Prezly to is that Veerle and Annelies are no longer limited to only using email to reach out to stakeholders. They can now share their stories on social media, making them more accessible for new as well as existing stakeholders.
"The social sharing options make it easy to share our stories in a dynamic environment where we can reach a broader audience."
Before, Veerle and Annelies were doing a huge amount of work without even knowing if it really paid off. Now they can instantly view detailed reports on the performance of their email campaigns. They can see who opened their emails, who clicked on them, and even who replied to them.
To tackle the difficulties they were having with sharing media assets, Veerle and Annelies decided to set up an online newsroom in which everything would be easily accessible and nicely presented.
While their first instinct was to build the whole thing by themselves, they quickly dropped that idea and decided to let Prezly take care of the technical aspect. After all, building their own platform by themselves would take months of development and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, Prezly’s input made the process simple and cost-effective.
Veerle and Annelies can now focus on the work that really matters. And they have just one piece of advice for other museums:
"Let Prezly take care of the technicalities, and focus on creating captivating stories yourself."
