The University of Manchester: “People actually want to share the content now”

The University of Manchester is the UK’s largest single site university with almost 40,000 students, and is also one of the world’s top research universities, with 25 Nobel Prize winners having worked or studied there. Jamie Brown, News & Media Relations Manager, oversees a team that is responsible for the day-to-day contact with journalists and promoting news about the University’s research and students. He also manages the online newsroom, which needed an update three years ago when he started at The University of Manchester.

Publishing stories was really time-consuming

Jamie: “For a number of years we had been using a CMS that we had developed ourselves. With this old CMS, it was really time-consuming to publish stories. But in addition to that it had limited multimedia options. We were looking for a solution which would enable us to more easily publish news stories with rich media such as video and photos, which can easily be shared via social media.” When looking into the solution that PressPage offered them, it seemed like a good fit: “We had strict brand guidelines and security guidelines, but all of those requirements were dealt with really professionally.”

Migrating seven years of history

There was a bit of a challenge: The University of Manchester wanted to migrate approximately seven years of stories (their archive consisted of more than 6,000 stories in total). “Although it seemed like a challenge, everything was migrated easily. Since the PressPage platform is so easy to use, it was quite easy to train other people within our team to use it. During this implementation our dedicated customer success manager responded quickly whenever there was an issue.”

Ease of use and flexibility

Overall Jamie is very happy with how the platform works for them. “The biggest benefit of working with this platform is how easy it is to use. We’ve trained people very quickly across different teams. It’s really flexible and people actually want to share the content now, which they didn’t before. Social media traffic to our website has dramatically increased, more people than ever before are reading the news articles and they’re staying on pages for longer.

One of the other pluses is that the news releases can be enriched with all sorts of media. “You can add a video, add an image gallery or even social media sharing options. Using PressPage saves us a lot of time in creating better releases and publishing them.”

Collaboration with PressPage

Jamie does not talk about a supplier, but about a partner. “Collaboration has been key to the success of this project. Not only does PressPage always respond quite quickly, we can also feed ideas in and we’ve noticed those ideas are coming back and being adopted on the platform. That’s really helped us to put our own ideas forward.”

Of course it does not stop here, there are also improvements to be made for The University of Manchester. Jamie notes: “We have seen the effect of the scientific community on Reddit, which made us think that we should do more with that platform. But also we want to incorporate our online magazine into our newsroom, to enrich the type of stories that are now being posted.”