VELUX: “We need a strong digital window to the world”

We spoke to Kathrine Westermann and Carsten Suhr about the challenges the VELUX Group encounters in the media landscape and how they use Presspage to overcome them.

A social media newsroom strengthening outreach

Sensing the rapidly changing media landscape, the VELUX corporate media relations team realized four years ago that they needed more than a traditional corporate newsroom to meet the future needs of their PR teams across markets.

In the future the VELUX Group would need one digital newsroom with the potential to work as a content hub journalists could pull press releases, images and videos from, but also a platform with social media were integrated, as they anticipated the disciplines would merge much more. Therefore the Presspage solution appeared as a new attractive platform.

The Presspage platform helped incorporate two central goals of the press department: press relations and increasing outreach through social media. The platform’s integration with social media has strengthened the Group’s reach, allowing them to turn their newsroom into a campaign hub from where they can launch content and bring traffic back to one single location. For Kathrine Westermann, “the newsroom is so much more in sync with how you do outreach today[…] It allows us to communicate on many channels, which is a big plus.”

A coherent global PR strategy

Although the VELUX Group started with just one newsroom for their corporate headquarter, today they run 14 individual VELUX newsrooms across Europe and North America using the Presspage platform. A significant factor in choosing Presspage was the coherent corporate branding that could be applied across their national newsrooms. Westermann explains “the newsroom reflects our brand and is completely in line with our corporate identity, our corporate website and our national marketing sites.” Using Presspage, each national team manages their content, while allowing the company to maintain a consistent brand message across each newsroom.

Westermann explains that they can now look at their overall global strategy, and easily decide to “boost their media performance in a specific country”. In fact, after the national offices in Poland, The Netherlands and France incorporated Presspage into their PR workflow, they recommended it to other sales regions within the VELUX Group.

Presspage as a Partner

Carsten Suhr, Senior Digital Business Strategy Manager at VELUX Group, was involved in the process of defining newsroom requirements and selecting a suitable newsroom platform.

“We are happy with the collaboration with Presspage. The feedback we provided during the onboarding and after the launch was taken seriously, and some requests they made have been turned into improvements of the platform.” Suhr notes “Presspage was a logic choice for us as a newsroom solution, but also in terms of attitude. We really liked the way Presspage looks at development and innovation.” Presspage relies heavily on the input of clients to prioritize developments and new features. The VELUX Group found this to be a great asset in the process.

Suhr goes on to explain, “for us, Presspage is a partner, not a vendor. It is not just about having a great newsroom, but it is also about good support in the roll-out of the newsroom and a high level of service. Presspage provides training and support to our media relations team who are the users of the platform. You don’t need your local web person to support your internal PR people; you have a dedicated Presspage support team that helps our staff around the clock”.

Flexibility and Ease of Use

For Westermann and Suhr, it was the platform’s flexibility and ease of use that made a big difference in the end. Their old content management system was laborious and unnecessarily complex, requiring the VELUX team to send press releases to an external vendor to publish on their behalf. Westermann explains that “in the long tendering process one of the most important points for us was to get full control of the editorial process.”

Using Presspage changed this, giving the media relations team full editorial power and the ability to decide what the content flow should be. They can edit releases in the newsroom instantly at any moment, without being dependent on external support.

Along with the ease of use, the editorial freedom also extends to analytics – the VELUX Group PR team no longer needs to dive into complex Google Analytics reports to gain insights into their traction. Using an easy to understand Statistics module in Presspage, the VELUX team is able to gain insights, and then optimize all their digital content.