Before: a Friday-afternoon scramble
Partner news arrived by email, WhatsApp, a shared inbox and the occasional phone call. A hotel opening, a chef award and a small festival announcement might all arrive in different places during the same week, with no single view of what was ready to pitch.
Releases were drafted from scratch in Word. Pitches went out from one person's inbox. Coverage was tracked in a spreadsheet that was usually two weeks out of date by the time the board asked for an update.
Week one: one front door for partner news
The branded submission portal went live on day seven. The team kept the form short: what happened, when it happened, who to quote, what images were available and whether the partner was happy for the story to be used across press, website and social channels.
By day fourteen, partners were submitting an average of six stories a week without being chased. The biggest shift was not volume alone. It was that every story arrived with enough structure for the comms team to make a quick editorial decision.
Week three: multi-partner releases
The team stopped treating every submission as a separate press release. Three accommodation updates became a spring short-break story. Two food awards and a new walking route became a weekend itinerary pitch. A cluster of event announcements became a what-to-book-now round-up.
Pickup rate from travel desks increased because the pitch looked less like a partner noticeboard and more like a useful destination trend. One spring-season release named eleven partners across six outlets and gave smaller businesses a route into coverage they would not have won alone.
Week six: the press room becomes the source of truth
Instead of attaching images to every email, Visit Anchorbay created a press room page for each packaged story. Journalists could download images, check captions, copy boilerplate and find the right contact without a follow-up thread.
The same page was reused by partners, the website team and the social scheduler. That mattered because the DMO's owned channels started to support the press workflow rather than sitting beside it as a separate job.
Week eight: the board notices
The first quarterly dashboard went to the board with named-outlet coverage doubled versus the same quarter the previous year. More importantly, the dashboard showed which partners had been named and which story themes were performing.
The renewal conversation got easier because the team was no longer asking directors to trust a vague awareness claim. They could show the member names, the outlet names and the workflow that created the result.
What the comms director says
'The biggest change isn't the tool. It's that I'm doing editorial work again instead of admin. I'd forgotten that was my job.'
The quote stuck with us because it is the point of the whole system. The value is not just faster drafting. It is giving a small comms team enough structure to make better editorial choices every week.
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