A new company promising to unlock the biggest public relations resource in the UK has launched to PR freelancers and independent communications consultants.
The PR Cavalry is the idea of industry veteran Nigel Sarbutts and claims to be a more effective way for both clients and agencies to find freelancers with precisely the right mix of experience, skills and contacts for their brief.
“The UK PR freelance talent pool is almost 10,000 strong, but until now there has been no way to search it effectively, so it remains under-utilised, dominated by word of mouth or ‘little black book’ contacts. We are introducing science and certainty to what has always been a laborious game of chance for agencies and clients – finding the perfect freelancer” says Sarbutts.
The PR Cavalry’s goal is to make it easy for clients and agencies to move from using freelancers as a stopgap and more as a strategic resource. “The barrier to that is technical – finding the right freelancer available at the right time, at the right budget. Removing that obstacle has the potential to transform the industry” he says.
The PR Cavalry works by freelancers creating a free, highly detailed and codified profile of their experience in individual sectors and categorising their industry contacts by seniority and recency. Scores of data points are analysed by The PR Cavalry’s algorithm and the matched results are shown to clients in the form of a ‘heat map’ which ranks freelancers by how closely their skills and experience match the brief, how recently they have been active in the client’s sector and by their day rate.
“We are recruiting freelancers now to join the platform, to create their profiles and join this exciting new way of sourcing client briefs and briefs to be fulfilled for clients. When enough freelancers are signed up for our search engine to produce deep, meaningful matches, we will open up to clients to post briefs” says Sarbutts.
It is completely free for freelancers to create their profile and gives them access to discounted subscriptions on PR services, such as media databases and campaign evaluation tools. The company has signed agreements with PR Max and MediaLists.co as well as an independent evaluation provider. The service is also free to clients to use.
When a freelancer has completed an assignment and the client has paid, The PR Cavalry will take a 10 per cent fee for the introduction and services provided.
The company has signalled its intent to build a long-term presence in the market by signing up as a sponsor of The Festival of PRin Edinburgh and is supporting a number of individual events for freelancers in Manchester and elsewhere.
The company has received private investment from venture capital backed Agile Automations which has also built the search and data handling algorithms, which sit behind the site.
Martin Keelagher, Director of Walford Cunningham & Hayes, which has backed Agile Automations and who acts as a Non-Executive Director of The PR Cavalry and Agile Automations, adds:
“Speaking from a client perspective, having instructed PR agencies and freelancers, it has always struck me as needlessly difficult to identify PR specialists for particular markets, who immediately understand the brief and add real, measurable value to a campaign. Upon meeting Nigel and discussing the potential to make this talent pool searchable using an intelligent data approach, I saw that the potential for The PR Cavalry is enormous and that we shall see the opportunity to scale quickly, to incorporate international markets and briefs.”
