4 tips for building an interactive PR manual

As part of your marketing plan to raise awareness for your product or service, public relations (PR) campaigns are an effective way to get free publicity from media outlets and encourage people to talk about your brand. And best of all, if you’ve already piqued their interest through PR, people will be more likely to become paying customers when they visit your website.

As a PR manager, it’s your responsibility to make sure your team knows how to execute a PR strategy to produce results. One tool for giving your team the support they need for rolling out a successful PR campaign is a PR manual. The manual may include content such as:

• How to develop a PR plan
• How to write news/press releases that get noticed
• How to use social media to support the PR strategy
• How to land—and nail—a media interview
• How to measure the effectiveness of a PR campaign

Providing your team with this knowledge can result in huge wins. But traditional PR manuals do have some pain points associated with them:

• Most manuals are PDFs stuffed with text and low-resolution images. 
• There’s no interactivity, which makes them boring to read. 
• Your team can’t check their understanding or practice their skills.  
• Updating traditional PR manuals is costly and time-consuming. 

You can squash these pain points and deliver a better experience with a web-based, interactive PR manual that puts the information your team needs right at their fingertips anytime they need it.

In this article, we’ll take a look at four helpful tips for building an online, interactive PR manual your team will love: 

Tip 1: Break up chunks of text into digestible, interactive content

Traditional PR manuals are divided into long chapters of text, making them hard to digest. But a web-based, interactive PR manual allows for more flexible structuring. You can break up lengthy chapters into more focused sections. Or, take it a step further by reorganizing related content into helpful interactions, such as an interactive accordion that expands and collapses as needed to reveal content. By breaking up and regrouping content, your team won’t become overwhelmed by big blocks of text.

You might be thinking: “That sounds great, but I don’t know how to build interactions!” That’s where an all-in-one training system like Rise comes in. It lets you build interactive guides and other training materials easily.

You simply stack modular content blocks, including interactions such as accordions, tabs, flip cards, and scenarios, to build interactive lessons. Breaking up big blocks of text with interactions, images, and videos makes the learning experience way more digestible. 

Tip 2: Replace text with media-rich content

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? Try replacing pages of text with images, videos, and even animated GIFs to help teach your team PR principles. For example, you could transform the chapter, “5 Steps to Creating a Compelling Media Event,” in your PR manual into a process interaction with videos and images that shows, rather than just tells, what a great event looks like.

A training system like Rise makes incorporating all sorts of media in your PR manual a breeze. Just insert an image or video block into your project and swap in your own content. Rise even includes an extensive library of gorgeous, royalty-free images you can use to create eye-catching lessons for your PR manual in a matter of minutes.

Tip 3: Build scenarios that put your learners in the driver’s seat

Traditional PR manuals distributed as static PDFs are usually pretty boring. But what if you could let your team practice applying the concepts you’re teaching them? 

Interactive scenarios are great for engaging learners, letting them flex their knowledge chops, and helping them retain information. With the scenario block in Rise, you can easily set up engaging, realistic scenarios. For example, you could create a scenario that lets your team practice press interviews. A realistic, interactive Q&A session is a much better way to prep them for high-pressure meetings than a bunch of bulleted guidelines! 

Tip 4: Reinforce and test learners’ new knowledge

You could have your team read a PDF PR manual then just let them sink or swim when developing the next campaign. Or, you can be sure they’ll nail it and avoid a PR disaster ahead of time. How? By adding a graded quiz to your interactive PR manual. 

Rise lets you add multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and matching questions in a jiffy. Then, you can access reports to see how your team scored, so you can identify knowledge or skills gaps before they start working on a high-stakes campaign.  

Wrap-up

Let’s recap the pros of building an interactive PR manual. 

An interactive PR manual gives you the flexibility to break up content into more manageable interactive chunks. Traditional PR manuals are organized into long chapters of text, making it hard to focus on content. 

You can develop content that sticks with learners using an interactive PR manual. You can replace static text and low-res images typically found in traditional PR manuals with engaging graphics, videos, and other multimedia content. 

Interactive PR manuals let you create an immersive experience with real-world scenarios that let learners practice what they’ve learned before they get into a high-pressure situation with media. That’s something a traditional PR manual sorely lacks. 

Finally, with an interactive PR manual that includes quizzes, you can test your team’s new skills in a controlled setting, see what knowledge gaps they have, and address them before you start your campaign.  

Interactive PR manuals clearly win. And they’re not hard to create with an all-inclusive training system like Rise. You can build a stellar, interactive PR manual your team will love in no time.

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