PulpPR is an award-winning, full-service technology communications agency, driven by a passion to create compelling narratives for innovative startups and well-established companies. They are agile communication scientists: measuring, analyzing, and combining the right mix of methods and tools to establish our clients as disruptors in their respective industries.

Jessica Hasson, the founder of Pulp PR, says:

We have team members all over the world — from our headquarters in Los Angeles, to Texas and Boston, all the way over to London and Germany. Plus, we’re always working with freelancers and consultants. It’s safe to say finding an effective relationship management tool was imperative.

Before we jumped into Muck Rack, we were using Cision. But to be honest, and this may age me, it felt like they just took the old Bacon’s books — those big encyclopedia-like books filled with contact information — and threw it up on a website and said, “Here! Have fun!” It really felt like a necessary evil. I compare it to a trip to the dentist — necessary but painful.

We’d also tried pairing a few CRM platforms with Cision through the years, but the integration was terrible, and these always just faded to the background of our workflow.

And, of course, we had relied on Google Sheets. We’d make specific lists for, say, “Los Angeles area reporters that cover technology,” and then house these in master lists. But even with Google Drive’s powerful search functions, there was still a lot of copying and pasting and overlapping happening.

I will say, too, that I became kind of a conduit for the team in terms of managing these relationships. I have this odd ability to remember relationship details, so people would just ask me questions about various contacts. Sure, this was convenient maybe, but it wasn’t efficient for anyone.

It’s obvious we needed an all-in-one solution to help us manage our pitches, relationships and media lists. Muck Rack turned out to be the answer. We started using it last year. First impressions? It’s seamless.

Pitch tracking with email integrations

What really convinced me to switch our whole agency over to Muck Rack was the email integration. Simple? Yes — but absolutely genius.

We love how Muck Rack then automatically logs the email on the appropriate journalists’ profile. So I can send a pitch and Muck Rack will automatically place it where my whole team can see the activity.

This allows me and my core pitchers to easily keep tabs on who’s pitching what as well as when and where. And the email integration just makes this all automatic, so it makes the whole process super efficient.

Master media lists for clients

We create master lists for all our clients. Within those master lists are sub-master lists. You can imagine the work it took to keep those updated within Google Sheets and to link them together.

Now, these lists live in Muck Rack, and we can easily organize them by client. This makes it easy to cross-reference the lists, add new contacts and keep them updated.

This allows me and my core pitchers to easily keep tabs on who’s pitching what as well as when and where. And the  email integration just makes this all automatic, so it makes the whole process super efficient.

Relationship owners and contact preferences

For each contact, we can assign a relationship owner — someone who owns a relationship with a specific journalist. We each have a group of core contacts we own, and, if you don’t own the relationship, the rule is to always defer to the relationship owner before reaching out.

This makes the process easy, and it ensures we aren’t bombarding any of our contacts with the same or multiple pitches all at once. We operate on a super strict do-not-spam policy, so this helps our team members adhere to that.

We also use Muck Rack to keep track of contact preferences in the notes section and designate “do not contact” parties. Before, we’d create a new spreadsheet tab, log that info there and hope no one slipped through the cracks. But now we can just easily add it to Muck Rack and call it a day. 

I will say, too, Muck Rack adds a level of “human” to our contacts. They’re not just the name on a list. We can see their picture, social profiles, recently published articles and more.