Jay Harkness is the Communications Officer for Forest & Bird – New Zealand’s largest independent conservation organisation – and he spends most of his time on media management. As a former journalist, Jay has a very well developed understanding of the life-cycle of a news story and knows exactly what tools he needs to make the most of it.

Forest & Bird relies on donations to fund their work and being a not for profit organisation means making the most of resources is extremely important.

Earlier this year Forest & Bird made the move from traditional media monitoring to Fuseworks. Jay fills us in on why he highly recommends Fuseworks media monitoring for anyone wanting to do more with less.

Spending time and money wisely

Keeping on top of the wide range of topics related to our native plants, animals and wild places, on land and in our oceans, is a huge task. “For a small organisation, we’re pretty busy on the media front. We average almost a couple of media releases a week and get around a hundred online media mentions a month” says Jay.

“Getting started was dead easy, and very fast.”

With all the additional responsibilities that come with being an NGO it’s clear that finding ways to work efficiently and get value for money are top priority.

Forest & Bird chose Fuseworks because of “the cost difference, and the ease with which we can produce either scheduled or custom reports. Producing a similarly-detailed monthly report used to represent a tonne of work” says Jay.

Getting started with Fuseworks “was dead easy, and very fast. Our account manager has been very good at providing ongoing support, as we tweak our extensive list of keywords” says Jay.

Jay loves how much time Fuseworks saves. “It’s really easy to create reports, and Fuseworks has the seemingly unlimited ability to customise reports and keywords. We can disseminate items of interest far faster than before.”

Moving to online only

Note: Fuseworks has since added NZME print newspaper monitoring.

“We had been using a news clippings service that covered offline and online media outlets … and given that we’re an organisation that is active across the whole country it was a big decision moving to online only” says Jay. Ultimately though “the service (from our old provider) wasn’t an ideal fit with what we actually needed.”

“It was a big decision moving to online only … the final choice was pretty clear.”

All the main publishers and broadcasters are putting their content online these days, but some of the small publications out in the regions aren’t quite there yet. Jay explains “many of our campaigns are set in the remotest parts of the country – and the nearest media outlets to those places may only publish hard copy. But for us the cost difference in going to online only meant the final choice was pretty clear.”