Stonewall

Challenge

Understanding impact

Stonewall focuses much of its efforts on key objectives: empowering individuals, transforming institutions, changing and changing hearts and minds. "My role involves ensuring Stonewall's key messages and research reach targeted media outlets to meet our organizational objectives."

Part of that involves ensuring that Stonewall talks to LGBT media, while at the same time, having separate conversations with trade press, regional outlets and both tabloid and broadsheet national news. "Without knowing where we have secured coverage, it's impossible to demonstrate ROI (in terms of having a Press Office) and understand the impact we've made in terms of campaign progress and achieving specific objectives for those campaigns. For example, if local news outlets are equally talking about the Rainbow Laces campaign."

Stonewall also needed to find a way to spot trends in coverage data. "It's important to set realistic but challenging KPIs; this can be difficult without data to guide you."

Solution

Showing success

Stonewall uses media monitoring to keep track of when and where it's mentioned in the media - be it in print, broadcast or online. "People can often underestimate the impact of PR or can't understand it's relevance to a campaigning organization. Media monitoring tools allow us to showcase our successes and justify our existence." Stonewall also uses Meltwater's reporting feature to understand its position, so it is able to set future goals.

"Meltwater's online media monitoring tool search function is simple to use. I like the fact that the tool offers a collection of similar words to search for." Meltwater clients often use the 'similar words' function to inspire them to think differently about what it is they are (and should be) searching for. Stonewall also talked highly of Meltwater's media monitoring tool search capability. "Our company name has many associations, such as the Stonewall Riots and football club Stonewall FC, however neither of these are associated with us. Meltwater's fluid Boolean search enables us to pull data that's only relevant to us. Our account manager was very patient in ensuring searches and data insights were bespoke."

Stonewall then distributes the secured coverage in the form of newsletters to key internal stakeholders. "Newsletters help us stay aligned from a company perspective. Having the ability to cherry-pick content is great, since we send a number of newsletters out to different audiences, and so it's important that each is tailored and relevant." Stonewall particularly likes the fact that newsletters can be branded and split into categories, for example organizational mentions and general LGBT news stories.