Prowly is an all-in-one platform for people looking to simplify their PR workflow and do powerful communication: find relevant journalists create visual press releases send targeted PR pitches and keep it all in a journalist-friendly online newsroom.
PR Newswire is a terrific solution for ensuring that news is distributed in a way that is findable and searchable. It also automatically ties the news to ticker symbols. It's not a useful or meaningful solution for actually securing news coverage. It still requires picking up the phone and pitching media.
Unlike other workflow management services, Prowly is generally more advanced when it comes to the process of modifying workflows according to the needs of the group, and therefore we recommend using it to work with large teams. This makes it easier to ensure that the right work is being done. Thanks to its editing facilities, it is also useful for press teams.
User-friendly - PR Newswire has a very user-friendly website that makes it simple and easy to get a news release set up for a distribution relatively quickly. You can also save your selections from a previous distribution to make it go even faster. Since I am pretty much always sending out my releases to the same distribution list, all I have to do is check that box.
Customer support - When you submit a release via the web portal, you have several options about when it will be released. I typically want my releases to go out as quickly as possible, but even then I know an account representative will take a look at my release and accompanying multimedia materials and give me a quick call to confirm and make sure everything is set before officially sending it out. It's a helpful step without making the process cumbersome.
Reports - PR Newswire provides timely and comprehensive reports, so it's easy to tell the where the news release went.
Prowly is a useful service in many areas that focus mostly on working remotely when it comes to groups, allowing to manage the workflow in the human resources area, or the management of these same workflows through manual configuration tools to focus on different departments.
The pricing structure is comprehensive, depending on how far you want your release to go.
Adding multi-media, such as photos, increases visibility quite a bit but PR Newswire charges extra for photos.
PR Newswire also charges an annual fee for storing your logo, which I think should be free for organizations that already have an account (and pay a membership fee).
Several of the functions that Prowly allows us to implement regarding public relations do not allow us to properly distribute the information through various channels, as in the case of its integration with some social networks, with which we can not even make mentions, which would be positive to work better in the area of community management.
PR Newswire is an industry leader and gives the user the ability to send out a press release, to a wide audience, very quickly and easily. The pricing is on par with other companies (perhaps they are a bit higher) but they do send useful "visibility" reports after a release is distributed, which is helpful when trying to explain ROI to C suite leaders. You also can email or fax your own distribution list, which is helpful and reduces the need for a media monitoring service
Honestly this is probably the absolute worst part of the company. I had maybe 5 different emails from 5 different people when attempting to use this service, and I never knew who my account manager was and who the other people were.
PR Newswire and Businesswire are familiar, similar products in terms of newswire distribution services. Many times it comes down to client familiarity with one service over the other, the cost per distribution, the reach of distribution, as well as other related fees, i.e., you have to be a member of PR Newswire to use the service and then pay fees on top of that for individual distributions.
If ROI is concerned, our group remains satisfied with the current earning capacity, so Prowly could turn out to be one of the software services with more guaranteed monetary benefits at different stages, depending mostly on the type of strategy we want to use to work with and the plan we choose.
