Q: We are lucky that reporters call our shop for information. Sometimes they contact the portfolio managers directly. Othertimes they find someone in our marketing department or our parent's PR department. With our lack of structure, we often take too long to get back to the reporter or someone drops the ball to get the request to the right person and we end up missing the opportunity. What policy and procedures would you recommend when a reporter calls us directly? Your help is appreciated. Head of distribution, midwest bank fund family.A: Thank you for the question. It is essential to have a structured process in place to manage inbound interview requests.
Designate someone internally or your PR firm as the media interview coordinator. Educate your staff on who the media coordinator is and her contact information. Communicate the importance of following the policy and procedures.
Then, when someone in your firm including portfolio managers are contacted directly, that person should take a message including name, publication, phone number, email address, information requested, and deadline, and quickly forward the message to your designated coordinator. Email usually works best. Your coordinator can screen, qualify by calling the reporter for more information, coordinate and prepare the portfolio manager for each interview, and follow-up with the reporter to ensure maximum coverage.
The coordinator will play an important role in keeping your portfolio managers and experts engaged in the process. For example, your experts will lose interest if she offers too many unfiltered and unrelevent media requests. She should politely decline if the interview isn't relevent for her firm. However, if the interview is one she wants to act on, often she will have to persude the manager to do an interview because it really is relevent even if not at first glance, the request comes from a major news publication where she wants to build a relationship, or the portfolio manager says he is too busy and just can't do it.
The value of a third-party firm that handles multiple mutual fund firms instead of an internal coordinator is if we think the interview makes sense for a client, we can offer it. If not, we won’t waste their time. Instead, we can still offer the interview to another client for which the interview could make sense. We never want a reporter to go unhelped. That’s one of the reasons SunStar has such strong relationships with the media.
You can email SunStar the details of a declined media request (after you politely decline it, of course).We will help the reporter by offering it to our relevent clients.
