• Start
• Team
  • Members
  • TU Braunschweig
  • Official Team Profile
  • Attributions
• Project
  • Project Outline
  • Results
  • Engineering Principles
  • Approach
  • Potential Impact
  • Parts submitted to the registry
  • Notebook
  • Protocols
  • Acknowledgements
• Human Practices
  • Overview
  • Activities
  • Guide Part 1 - Communication strategy
  • Guide Part 2 - Implementation
  • Guide Part 3- Media Coverage Report
  • Guide Part 4 - Social Media Analysis
• Cooperations
• Safety
• Judging
• 

How to succeed in Public Relations - Media Coverage Report

We feel that all the thoroughly planned events and activities around the world shouldn‘t be overlooked and we hope that this tool will help you to fully leverage the impact of your activities!
As it comes to press relations, the coverage report is the most important instrument. It contains the clippings that were collected over a certain period of time, in our case half a year. Clippings are press cuttings, thus all publications that are related to the company or organization in question. Clippings are the most important instrument to measure the success of public relation activities. They mirror the publicity of an organization and thus its success and image. The coverage report usually starts with an overview chart of all press activities.

The front page of our coverage report. Click to download the full report.

The second part consists of the detailed clippings with the original press cuttings or screen shots from the websites where the article was published. Every article gets its own page in the report where the source, the date, the kind of publication (print or online) and the reach are documented.

Date	July 7, 2013
Medium	Neue Braunschweiger
Publication (print/online)	print
Frequency of Publication	Twice per week
Coverage	495,443

An example of a print clipping in a local newspaper

Which figures does the report include and what do they tell us?
Creating a coverage report at least three different kinds of publications have to be taken into account: Print, online and social media. Of course also television and radio programs should be considered. In our case there were press reportings about our team in print, online and social media. That is why we will focus on these three channels in the following.

Print: To calculate the coverage of a newspaper article you need the daily print run. Coverage means how many people could have come into contact with your article. In 2010 the average number of readers of one newspaper was determined to be 2.8.Accordingly the coverage of a newspaper article equals the daily print run multiplied by 2.8.
Example: The daily print run of the newspaper are 20,641 copies. 20,461 copies x 2.8 (readers per copy) = 57,795 coverage.

Date	June 27, 2013
Medium	Peiner Allgemeine Zeitung
Publication (print/online)	print
Frequency of Publication	Daily
Coverage	57,795

Clipping Peiner Allgemeine Zeitung

Online: The most important figure are the so called “Page Impressions” that tell about the number of users who accessed a single website. The figures are collected and summarized to a monthly figure.
Example: The average visits per month are 165,389.

Date	May 23, 2013
Medium	hausderwissenschaft.org
Publication (print/online)	online
Frequency of Publication	Daily
Page impressions	165,389

Clipping hausderwissenschaft.org

Social Media: The coverage of social media activities is not as easy to measure as print and online activities. This is because there is a lot of data that could be taken into account. For example the number of fans/followers, the number of people talking about a fanpage, the activity of the fans and so on. To make these figures comparable to each other we decided to use the monthly outreach of our Facebook fanpage following the procedure for online coverage.
Example: Our fanpage had an average monthly reach of 3,826 single users. Reach in this case means the number of single users that saw any content related to the fanpage during one month.

To measure the success of Twitter activities a formula for coverage that factors in the number of tweets during one month and multiplies it with the number of followers can be used. As there is no automatic or provided tool to see twitter statistics, this is the easiest way to measure the reach.
Example: In August the Helmholtz Center of Infection Research (HZI) tweeted about us and recommended our Twitter account to their followers. Since the formula is based on the monthly outreach, the HZI’s 31 tweets and 383 followers in August have to be taken into account. Hence, the monthly reach was 11,873 single users.

Date	August 16, 2013
Medium	twitter.com/Helmholtz_HZI
Publication (print/online)	online
Frequency of Publication	Daily
Page impressions	11,873

Clipping Twitter HZI.org

As an example the full clipping report of the iGEM Team Braunschweig 2013 can be downloaded here.
To learn more about Social Media Analysis click here.

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