Months of research, analysis, and interviews – plus the expected levels of blood, sweat, and tears – are poured into developing NewsWhip products. Why do we do this? Because we know how much our increasingly busy partners value time, accurate reporting, and the ability to switch off on a Saturday to spend time with family and friends instead of in spreadsheets and dashboards.
As our client onboarding specialist, Alex Kallner has had the pleasure of speaking with every client using NewsWhip at some juncture. Working in tandem, he helps them figure out their use cases, and how they can get the most value out of our toolset.
“All new users will at one point have interacted with me. We typically end up doing a ton of in-the-weeds analysis together, where I’m showing them how to replicate what I’ve done in Spike.”
Alex Kallner
In short, Alex knows the unique yet universal needs of each client. As such, he’s perfectly positioned to outline how we developed the NewsWhip ROI calculator.
Why build an ROI Calculator?
The answer to that is simple; how better to showcase the tangible benefits of using the NewsWhip platform to your C-Suite and relevant stakeholders than showing them the financial benefits of it?
On that note, a little spoiler for you before we give you a proper peek behind the curtain; our research showed that on average NewsWhip users save almost $100k a year. This saving is based on clients creating 16 reports and managing 57 real-time alerts and 29 scheduled digests per month. The hourly analyst rate is a modest $67.50 — in reality this could be much higher.
Throughout his onboarding process with large global brands agencies and publishers, we’ve noticed a commonality of needs irrespective of industry.
“Everyone wants the same thing in the new media ecosystem. They want to cut through noise. They also want to get to the heart of what does and does not warrant their attention. That means they need access to a tool that’s going to address three essential specializations.”Alex Kallner
The three specializations in question will seem familiar…
1. Speed: Accessing information as soon as it’s published online or posted on social media is vital. For instance, if something is posted on Reddit – whether you’re involved in the conversation or just tracking it – the quicker you’re aware, the better. Even a few seconds to a minute can significantly impact a topic’s trajectory and your response to it.
2. Specificity: Having the ability to zero in on specific discussions and topics, down to the keyword level, such as brand reputation keywords.
3. Context: Context is king. In this instance, it involves placing all this information into the bigger picture to determine its relevance and significance to you and your brand.
“NewsWhip is really good at zooming in and out on all of that. It takes a large composite of different data sources – in that wider context – without sacrificing speed and is still very specific. Across the board, that is what everyone gets value out of, no matter who they are.”
Alex Kallner
How NewsWhip brings value to comms
NewsWhip’s toolset – including AI Digest, Report Builder, and Real-Time Alerts – integrates the three key aspects of speed, specificity, and context, and allows you to navigate seamlessly between them.
These NewsWhip tools were Alex’s access points when creating the calculator. They helped him to decipher A) how much time the calculator could save people and, B), how to assign a dollar amount to that.
“When I’m training users, these are the first features that I position most prominently, as the single biggest factors that are going to start cutting significant time out of their day.”
Alex Kallner
AI Digest: AI Digest combines the dependability of NewsWhip’s trusted data with the speed of GPT insights.. Let’s say you need to understand top coverage of a topic. In the absence of AI Digest, a team member would ordinarily spend hours reading and summarizing the top 20-30 articles. AI Digest does this automatically. It delivers categorized summaries with descriptions and live links to the most relevant articles. This saves significant time, transcending industry-specific needs, and eliminates the budget for extensive reporting and analysis.
Report Builder: Report builder allows you to quickly capture your entire customized NewsWhip dashboard, the nerve center for all activities on a specific subject. With a single click, you can create a ready-made deck with live links in less than 5 seconds, instead of spending 1-2 hours manually collating the information.
Real-Time Alerts: These alerts allow you to track posts as soon as they are published, emphasizing the primary need for speed. When you receive a Spike Alert, you can be confident that you’re the first in your company to get this information, and they mean you’ll avoid that dreaded email from the CEO asking if you’d seen a certain story.
“Most of the insights teams who have their alerts set up on hot-button issues are the ones who are either sounding the alarm or just sending out the signal to the rest of the company… When you’re equipped with those three tools, that’s going to transform your team. They put you in a position within your company that is so much more advantageous than before you had them – this is why I focus on them so heavily.”Alex Kallner
The drivers behind creating the calculator
While onboarding clients to Spike, Report Builder, and AI Digest, Alex observed a significant increase over the past two years in CFOs and procurement teams being more hands-on in approving budgets for tools like NewsWhip.
Moreover, he noticed that teams across various industries often lack a common vocabulary to discuss a tool’s value. Whether it’s an insights team, a comms team, or any department of 5 to 100 people, they struggle to quantify their experiences in monetary terms when speaking to CFOs or procurement.
This challenge was one of the main motivators behind the creation of the calculator. With his unique perspective from engaging with clients ranging from CFOs to end-users, we saw that they were often identifying and quantifying value without fully realizing it.
To bridge this gap, we developed the calculator to act as a universal translator, helping our partners to communicate and understand each other’s perspectives on value.
Who benefits from the calculator?
It is worth noting that much of NewsWhip’s value is intangible. It’s in what doesn’t happen. For instance, any day you spend time monitoring a potentially critical story for it to amount to nought should be considered a success. It’s never time wasted.
While the ROI Calculator defines the workflow value of NewsWhip, and how much money you can save there, it doesn’t speak to that intangible, reputational value that it can bring in terms of getting ahead of a potentially critical story. NewsWhip provides both tangible and quantifiable value.
For example, through his months of researching and interviewing clients to create this calculator, Alex learned that entire new processes and workflows have been invented around Spike – simply because it’s a tool they didn’t previously have.
As for who directly benefits from it? In case there are any lingering question marks around that; the short answer is “everyone benefits.” At the risk of channeling Oprah; “You get the benefit of budgetary savings, and you get a benefit of a better night’s sleep thanks to our accurate expedited reporting!” Or, as Alex more deftly puts it:
“You have storytellers, and then you have people who are looking specifically just at hard numbers. With the calculator, those benefits are there for everyone to see. But telling the story is kind of the first step.”
Alex Kallner
If you’re curious about how our calculator could help you benefit your company by making the case for NewsWhip, check out the calculator here and see how much you could save.
