Learn how the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, uses Muck Rack to:
- Save time curating topic-specific media lists with Muck Rack’s media database
- Easily connect with top tier media by pitching directly through Muck Rack
- Keep up-to-date with media coverage using Who Shared My Link
Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that administers Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Their vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. The Foundation maintains the technological infrastructure that sustains its sites, and develops tools and services that make it easier for everyone to contribute content. They also support Wikipedia’s volunteer communities by facilitating partnerships with other nonprofit organizations, advocating for policy issues that impact free knowledge, and providing grants and other resources to volunteers.
Samantha Lien
Senior Communications Manager
One of the things that I appreciate most about Muck Rack is how the company is constantly innovating on the platform—offering new ways to use it, new tools to try out, and industry insights to learn from. The platform itself and its constantly-evolving features have been invaluable for our communications work.
—Samantha Lien, Senior Communications Manager
In Their Own Words: Wikimedia’s Favorite Muck Rack Features
Media Research
When it comes to media research, our PR agency usually provides an initial media list for our campaigns, and we upload that to Muck Rack.
Taking this approach enables us to better prioritize and hone our media lists by looking closely at journalists’ profiles, what they’ve written about recently and checking out their social media handles, all within the platform. It’s a helpful way to refine our targets for outreach and ensure we’re connecting with the journalists who are interested in our stories
In December 2019, we launched our #WikiForHumanRights campaign in partnership with the United Nations Human Rights office (UNHR). The campaign aimed to educate readers about human rights issues and encourage Wikipedia editors to continue improving and expanding articles about human rights. To raise awareness about the initiative, we needed to identify human rights reporters who were interested in covering the campaign’s messages and calls to action. Muck Rack made it possible for us to find reporters around the world covering the human rights beat quickly and efficiently.
Before Muck Rack, we used a static spreadsheet that was nearly impossible to keep updated, especially with multiple people across our team engaging with reporters. It became unwieldy and outdated quickly. Muck Rack made that static spreadsheet a living, relevant and easily accessible resource.
In-Platform Pitching
The in-platform pitching capabilities within Muck Rack have been helpful when it comes to personalizing pitches to reporters and providing clear and easy tracking of how those pitches are opened or responded to.
Prior to Muck Rack, our team would send individual emails to reporters, a time-consuming strategy that also made it difficult to track which pitches were responded to and how. Muck Rack makes it easy to get a bird’s eye view of how a pitch is performing, who we need to respond to, and how to adjust our strategy quickly based on real-time insights on open and click-through rates.
For the #WikiForHumanRights campaign, the first time we used Muck Rack, I quickly learned that we needed to scale back the length of our pitches and offer more personalization based on the performance of the pitch and Muck Rack’s helpful in-platform suggestions.
Before we had Muck Rack, it could take anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours just to send out pitches; it was an extremely arduous process. Now, we can send off well-structured and personalized pitches in under an hour.
—Samantha Lien, Senior Communications Manager
Who Shared My Link
Who Shared My Link has been a valuable input for our team to better understand the impact of our media outreach even beyond earned media coverage.
One great example of this was with the #WikiHerStory initiative we ran in March during Women’s History Month. We did some light pitching as part of the initiative, but press coverage was not a major goal at that time. Because of this, it was useful to see the organic engagement from reporters on social media around the hashtag and then understand how the initiative came to be on their radar.
For our team, it’s been really interesting to see the overlap between the proactive, earned media we secure as a direct result of pitching alongside the more organic coverage of our stories. As social media and traditional media become increasingly intertwined, the Who Shared My Link feature has been helpful for us to understand how our outreach is resulting in media coverage and social media engagement from reporters in new, and sometimes, surprising ways.
Fast Questions with Samantha Lien
1. In addition to results, what other benefits have you experienced from Muck Rack perhaps in terms of teamwork and collaboration?
The act of pitching through Muck Rack has been a huge time saver. We used to do things really old school, essentially just copying and pasting the pitch manually into all of our emails. This was tough, as one person would be responsible for connecting with a reporter on our team, and it was hard to stay informed of who had responded to an email, who needed a draft press release under embargo, and who we already reached out to.
As our team has grown, it’s been important for us to find tools that allow us to streamline our work and collaborate asynchronously. Now, it’s easy to see who responded to a pitch, who needs a follow up email, and how our outreach is performing in real time. This enables us to move quickly and be more agile in our pitching.
2. What has your experience been like working with Muck Rack’s customer success team?
I was new to Muck Rack about a year ago, and the customer success team was a huge help in getting me onboarded to the platform and explaining all of the features within Muck Rack. I still rely on them today to help with uploading media lists! I’ve used the chat feature within the platform quite a bit as well—it’s a great way to get a timely response, especially when we’re moving quickly to pitch an upcoming story and need some help fast.
3. How would you describe your team’s new workflow on Muck Rack in three words?
Useful, relevant, strategic
4. What would you tell other companies considering using Muck Rack?
Muck Rack is a great resource for working in the communications industry in the 21st century. The platform will help you understand how to work with reporters more strategically and effectively while also better understanding the impact of your work with the media.
5. What would your job be like if you didn’t have Muck Rack?
Without Muck Rack, pitching would certainly be more time-consuming, but we also wouldn’t have the same data we’ve come to rely on to understand how our pitches are performing and whether we’re identifying the right reporters for a story.
*Headshot courtesy of Myleen Hollero
