When Omar McCrimmon came to the National Human Genome Research Institute as a media relations specialist, he knew he needed a powerful solution for keeping his campaigns organized.
“Our organization is famous for the human genome project; it’s our claim to fame,” says Omar. “We’re opening a Smithsonian exhibit at the Museum of Natural History next year and there are a lot of good things coming out. We get so much information and so many inquiries that it’s impossible to keep things in order without a platform like Vocus.”
A Vocus user for four years, Omar uses every aspect of the Vocus PR Suite in his campaigns, from activity tracking and reporting to the media database and news distribution.
“We have a lot of breakthroughs in research lately,” Omar says. “I keep up with that by using the media activity functions of Vocus. The suite lets me go in and dig out contacts. We can build different media lists, for example – pre-embargo lists and post-embargo lists – which are a good way to get out there. Having access to reporters that way is great because you can really target your pitches.”
“Bravo to the developers of Vocus. There are a lot of challenges with communicating science, but having everything I need on a single dashboard makes my life easy.”
“We also get a lot of incoming inquiries on a daily basis,” Omar says. “They might be large requests from the media or small questions from the public. Vocus lets us put everything together. It’s great to have everything in one place.”
“We have a lot of breakthroughs in research lately. I keep up with that by using the media activity functions of Vocus.” (Image: N.H.G.R.I.)
Viewing the latest reports, media hits and more is easy with PR Suite analytics.
“To pull a report within Vocus takes two minutes, tops,” says Omar. “That’s one of the things that I really love. When you have ten minutes to get ready for a communications meeting, you can go into Vocus, click two dates and you’re done.”
“You have everything there; all the inquiries that you need to check. You can see the success that you’ve had with any a specific topic. You can look back and say: we may not have gotten as much attention with this story as we would have liked, so maybe we should pitch this out a bit more.”
“We use the prominence and scoring function a lot that way to see where things stand as far as topics are concerned. We try to compare a lot of our research topics, like, for example, our Smithsonian announcement against our undiagnosed diseases program (which is huge – we just got a 60 minutes piece on that). We’ll compare two topics against each other just to see how things pair up and how they did in terms of coverage.”
“Bravo to the developers of Vocus,” says Omar. “Vocus makes me happy. There are a lot of challenges with communicating science and the different kinds of research that we do, but to have everything I need in one place on a single dashboard makes my life very easy.”
