Planet Ark

Planet Ark had been using FileMaker for more than 10 years to manage its mission of helping Australian’s live in balance with nature. Until recently there was no implementation to help Planet Ark’s media team in the crucial work of getting the word out to journalists. The team were using spreadsheets to keep media contact details and campaign information.

“There were multiple spreadsheets for the same purpose, and version control issues,” says Ian Bridges, Planet Ark’s chief information officer. “The media team couldn’t access, collate or report across all those files which were stored in different places.”

Part of the media team’s job was to match journalists with event sites and volunteers they could report on. That was almost impossible given that information was dispersed across so many files.

Our brief was to develop software that would:

• Be a central database of media contacts
• Manage the workflow of pitching stories to media outlets
• Be able to handle multiple campaigns simultaneously
• Show records of interactions with journalists
• Match journalists to campaign events and volunteers based on their location

That’s exactly what we created for Planet Ark, but as part of our discovery process, we watched the team at work. We noticed there was a mad rush at the peak of a campaign because new event locations were being registered during the campaign but there was no opportunity to match them to journalists in advance. Based on our observations, we added a feature that matches newly registered sites with local journalists, allowing the team to maximise media coverage.