SourceFourth is a CRM made with journalists in mind.
52% of journalists produce at least 5 stories a week—with 20% of them producing 11 or more stories a week! Let’s imagine that each story has 3 unique sources, minimum. In that case, a single journalist could be juggling relationships with 33 sources in a single week. In addition, journalists also maintain active relationships with PR and communications professionals on their beat, attend events and network, and pursue long-term projects not related to their day-to-day coverage. All things considered, a single journalist might accrue, contact, and leverage the expertise of 50+ people in a week.
How are they tracking those connections? Most likely, they’re not—or they’re relying on an email client’s contacts manager to save email addresses.
When I worked in journalism and marketing, I used two different “contact managers”: Microsoft Word and Google Spreadsheets. When I did research for a piece, I often made lists of potential sources in Word, tracking folks’ names and contact information. On a regular basis, though, I’d close the document without saving, forget where I saved particular information, or overwrite it entirely. Google Spreadsheets was a bit more organized—if only because of its table structure—but it was still tedious and time-consuming to search and find a source, not to mention impossible to add someone through my phone.
SourceFourth is a customer relationship management platform (CRM) made specifically with journalists in mind. SourceFourth streamlines the data entry process, making it easy and painless to add sources and contacts. SourceFourth then organizes the sources by industry expertise, workplace, or location in order to streamline the search process for a source when you need one.
To add a source, you only need to enter the source’s name and some form of contact information (either phone or email address). That’s it; no more tedious fields to fill out just to quickly add a contact. However, optional fields tailor the SourceFourth experience to a journalist’s needs, with fields including dates of previous contact, willingness to speak on the record, areas of expertise, links to previous stories in which the person was a source, and more. It also allows a user to create story lists and add sources, in order to track outreach on a particular reported piece.
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As a user, I want to be able to log into my account that only I can see.
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As a user, I want to be able to see a list of all of my sources, sorted by most recently added.
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As user, I want to be able to add a source with just his/her name and phone number or email address.
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As a user, I want to be able to access SourceFourth from a mobile device and have a seamless experience with the web app.
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As a user, I want to be able to search my contacts based on location, expertise, name, profession, etc.
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As a user, I want to be able to enter additional information about sources, including their willingness to talk on the record, previous stories they appear in, areas of expertise, date of last contact, and any additional comments I have.
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As a user, I want to be able to create "source lists" for particular stories, in order to group relevant sources for a story I'm working on.