đź’ˇ Pitch

Hiring PR agencies - pitch

Andras P. Toth
Andras P. Toth
authors:
Andras P. Toth Andras
  and
Michelle Baun Claveria Michelle


Googl Doc over here

1. Summary

We currently don't have PR. We'd love to have PR, to get links & social proof & to steal the processes of PR agencies, so we could build our own internal PR.

2. Context

  • CodeBerry does nice things (teaching people, helping people change careers, providing scholarships, creating a nice remote work environment, etc.).
  • The user acquisition of CodeBerry relies on paid acquisition channels (Google Ads, Facebook Ads), referral programs and content marketing.

3. Problem

  • Even though CodeBerry does nice things, news outlets don't write about us, because we don’t reach out to them (mostly because we have no network and no inside processes built related to this topic).
  • When students search for CodeBerry, they see little amount of “external social proof” type of evidence, where credible channels like news outlets would say CodeBerry is valid.
  • Also, having links from external websites is important from an SEO perspective. Our domain gains strength when we get links from strong sites, like news outlets.
  • In the near future, we’re going to have “free locales”, where we have a good chance to be featured in local media in many countries, if we have a good reach-out process built. 

In one sentence: 
  • We don’t have PR.

3. Appetite

6 weeks.

4. Solution

4.1 Overview of the solution
  • we hire an expert to help us with preparing the brief & evaluating offers
  • we conduct a few interviews with fellow startup friends, who already do PR
  • we hire & onboard agencies in hu-HU, ro-RO, pl-PL, and es-MX
  • [mid-term goal: we learn what do they do and how do they do it, and will replicate it in-house for the free locales]

4.2 Preparation we did for this pitch

We already conducted a few interviews in this topic to prepare a bit:

What we’ve learned: 
  • PR is a local thing, it makes sense to have separate agencies at every locale
  • there are many agencies in every country, selecting a good one is not an easy job, Krisztina can help with this
  • we can go in two directions
    • 1) a bit more technical – let’s do traditional stuff, like research, press releases, buy articles in newspapers, where we can put our keywords and have valuable links
    • 2) unconventional – do fun and weird stuff and get press this way


4.3 Details of the solution

4.3.1. We hire an expert to help us with preparing the brief & evaluating offers
We think Krisztina from ex-NNG is a good candidate to help us with this. She can help us with
  • creating a brief (a set of questions we’ll put in the questionnaire we send to the agencies)
  • evaluate the offers that come in
  • help us with the live interviews
4.3.2. We conduct a few interviews with fellow startup friends, who already do PR
Good candidates are
  • Bonyhádi Gabi / CodeCool
  • Logischool
  • we can ask around at SpeedPack
4.3.3. We hire & onboard agencies in hu-HU, ro-RO, pl-PL and es-MX
  • We do local research to get a list of English speaking local PR agencies
  • We create a brief with the help of Krisztina
  • We evaluate the offers that come in with the help of Krisztina
  • We conduct live interviews
  • We do the onboarding (paperwork, Slack channels, scheduling meetings, answering questions about our positioning, initial meetings etc.)

5. Rabbit holes

  • Go to countries that are “paying, operating” countries at the moment. Currently this means hu-HU + ro-RO + pl-PL and es-MX.
  • Make sure that the PR agencies are open to have regular meetings with our team and share their processes.
  • We know that we don’t know the cost of PR yet. We are fine to find this out during the project.

6. No-gos

  • We know that hiring & interviewing takes time, so we don’t expect news articles to happen about us in this cycle, we expect the onboarding to be completed by the end of the cycle.

6. Measuring the results

  • Number of PR agencies onboarded

7. Suggested builder team


role name | est. hours | proposed people | who else could do this | what will they do
Project Owner | 16 | Andris | Michelle | Participate in team meetings, work with the consultant on the brief, participate in live interviews, help with the onboarding
Project Manager | 16 | Michelle  | Eniko | Schedule & participate in team meetings and agency meetings, help with the paperwork and onboarding
Marketer | 4 | Gio | Carmen | Research local PR agencies
PR consultant | 12 | Krisztina | Help with preparing brief, help with shortlisting agencies, help with live interviews
CEO | 1 | László | Signing contracts

8. Shaper time

How much time did this shaping take?
  • Interviews: 4 hours (not exclusively done for this project)
  • Michelle: 1 hour
  • Andris: 2 hours