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Collective Creativity: The Power of Brainstorming for PR Success
May 3, 2024
As a PR practitioner, staying ahead of the curve is crucial. And the fast-paced news cycle and the popularity of social media as an online news platform has made keeping on top of things both more challenging and more important than ever before.
Like many businesses, we recognise the important role brainstorming has in keeping us on our front foot for our clients –, but it isn’t a once only kind of exercise. From daily huddles to quarterly sessions, we opt for constantly exchanging ideas, sharing perspectives on the news and planning ahead to secure the best and most appropriate coverage for our clients.
How we do it in three crucial ways:
Every Monday morning, I circulate our Pumpkin News Rota. This allocates every member of the team at Pumpkin, two to three news titles – a mix of national, trade, vertical and research/analyst press – which are their responsibility to ‘own’ for the week. We update and alternate this list weekly, to ensure no one gets stuck with the same title and everyone has an opportunity to keep up to date with stories across a range of topics.
Every morning we start the day with a news meeting, in which we share the stories that have caught our eye, breaking news, stories related to existing/up-and-coming client work or clients’ new business targets/sectors. From this we identify which of our clients the stories will be relevant for, and whether there’s potential for us to newjack a story on behalf of a client, use it as a new hook for an existing pitch, press releases or thought leadership or to flag it as something of interest.
This strategic thinking has led to many great opportunities for our clients over the years, recently there has been coverage in titles like Fast Company, Ad Age and The Drum for Interbrand commenting on Tesla’s earnings.
And we continue this process throughout the day to ensure we’re on top of unfolding stories and ready to use current events to maximise clients’ coverage.
Every quarter we host a company-wide brainstorm for the next three months, again allocating key dates and topics across the team several weeks in advance and coming to the session ready to discuss. These sometimes take place over a lovely lunch too!
Planning ahead like this every quarter, allows us to always have ideas locked and loaded for our clients and is especially effective for content around key dates.
As an example, in our Q2 brainstorm, we highlighted International Women’s Day and Women’s History Months as potential news hooks for our clients – we work with a range of incredible female leaders and businesses that champion important DEI work. We brainstormed potential opportunities and angles we could pitch ahead of time, to make sure we made the most of the date. This preparation and idea generation led to coverage for our client RAPP UK’s CEO Gabby Ludzker, including an interview with Management Today and Creative Pool, as well as a thought piece in Ad Age to offer strategies to parents returning from parental leave, highlighting her own unique experience.
Over the Desk
Like many other businesses, we have adopted hybrid working and it’s the office days when face-to-face time with colleagues elevates our idea generation.
There’s nothing better than overhearing a conversation about recent news, or about something a client is working on, and being able to talk over the desk and collectively build upon initial ideas. It’s the classic ‘conversation around the watercooler approach’ except that we drink tap water!
These quick huddles have led to vox-pop ideas, or questions of the week to pitch to those coveted target titles.
Harnessing the power of brainstorming, and collective creativity, is vital to the job that we do for our clients and one of the most stimulating and effective ways of supporting organic idea sharing and generating fresh, timely angles that resonate with journalists and audiences alike.
By Chloe Portwain.