PR Coffee Chat: Best Tips for Staying Organized

At Power Digital, we feel that productivity can only be fully reached if you are totally buttoned up and organized. In Public Relations in particular, it’s critical to have all of your outreach, lists, calls and other everyday responsibilities planned for and prepared for.

You might be wondering how we do this?

Here are a few helpful tools we use to stay organized:

Hourstack – I know we all hate time tracking, but you’ll love it when you know how to actually use it to keep organized. In our PR department, we use hourstack to account for how much time is spent on specific tasks and clients. That way we can identify which task is a time suck and how we can optimize that process to make it more efficient.

We are also able to see what each team member is working on so we aren’t double dipping and it stimulates great conversion. Hourstack has improved our department’s overall efficiency and really helps us stay on task and finish what we start in the most time efficient manner.

Asana – we love lists. Whether media lists or everyday checklists. We figured out that why we love lists so much is the gratification of actually checking something off and seeing it go bye-bye.

That’s why we LOVE Asana. Using this organizational tool, we have full visibility into everyone’s workload. We can chat about a specific project in Asana and actually task out assignments using this tool. We can set hard deadlines and share progress with clients as well.

Agendas – If you are organized, your client is usually organized. That’s why it’s critical for us to create agendas before we connect with our clients. These agenda are usually very simple. We start the conversation with the dial in at the top of the doc so it’s clear how to get in touch. We then dive into the “topics of discussion” so address any new topics that we need to integrate or delegate across teams.

Then we usually dive into each channel update. This way, it gives opportunities for each team member to address questions or concerns. Most importantly, we open up the floor for the client to address any outstanding items. This is usually a time to brainstorm and discover amazing ideas to keep the account moving forward and innovative.

Quick Tip – make sure you send the agenda prior to the call and a follow up email outlining next steps after the all.