HOW TO PR YOUR FUNDRAISE: A MASTERCLASS FOR CLIMATE CONNECTION AT THE CONDUIT
HOW TO PR YOUR FUNDRAISE
A HARPSWOOD MASTERCLASS FOR CLIMATE CONNECTION AT THE CONDUIT
How do you attract media attention when you are trying to raise money for your startup?
And how can you use the media to announce a successful raise?
These were the two main questions covered in a Harpswood Masterclass: How To PR Your Fundraise.
The session was run by James Clench, Harpswood founder, and Pete McCarthy, Harpswood account manager, at the Climate Connection event held at The Conduit in Covent Garden.
For those who were unable to attend, we run through the main points covered in the session in this blog.
If you are interested in this topic, we are running a breakfast panel featuring Jess Jones, Senior Reporter for the Entrepreneurs Network at The Times, Matthew Blain, partner at Voyager Ventures VC, and Anatolii Papulov, founder of satellite scaleup NewOrbit.
It’s at 9am on Thursday October 29 at Fora Folgate near Liverpool Street. Reserve your spot here.
Q: Shouldn’t you be trying to raise your profile through PR before you fundraise?
A: Absolutely. The power of PR – and what differentiates it from other marketing disciplines – is third party validation. This is the effect of someone other than you talking about you positively. It’s not you paying for advertising, it’s not you talking about yourself on social media. Third party validation is when a journalist has scrutinised you in an interview or profile piece, looked at your credentials and decided you have passed muster. Only PR and word-of-mouth recommendations can give you that third party validation.
Here’s an example of how we did that with engineering startup Isembard, accruing third party validation as it built to its huge $50 million Series A raise.
that third party validation gives you credibility with your audiences, including investors.
Harpswood has met startup founders who are well along their journey and haven’t done PR. They have told us stories about meeting investors who say: “We like the business, but we’ve never heard of you, no one seems to know you.”
Investors may not read stories about you or your business when those stories are first published. But you can be certain they will search your name online before any meeting. And you can be certain that positive media coverage will positively influence them.
Another vital platform which cares about third party validation is AI search or GEO. ChatGPT and Claude won’t just take your word on what an amazing business you are and how you can solve a particular problem. It needs someone else, someone trusted, to vouch for you. A credible news publication is ideal. So PR is going to help you become a trusted, cited source in an AI generated answer.
PR can also raise your profile, reaching an audience beyond those who may be engaging with your social media or who are targeted by your advertising.
Q: So why do businesses that understand the value of PR wait until a significant raise to engage with an agency?
A: The biggest reason here is a pretty simple one: budget. PR is competing with your spend on hiring, office space, R&D, all the other marketing channels.
Time is a huge issue. When you build a business from scratch, you are doing everything – sales, finance, marketing, recruitment – there isn’t a lot of time left over in the day to be emailing journalists.
We know too that some businesses feel they don’t have any worthwhile stories to tell in the media when they are at an early stage. They simply think the media won’t be interested in them. We think that is rarely the case. A good PR person will usually find an angle that will work for a journalist.
Q: So have I left it too late for PR if I haven’t engaged with it before announcing the fundraise?
A: Absolutely not. Any significant fundraise is a potential story for a journalist, a good hook to announce that you have arrived as a business. It’s not a guaranteed story but it definitely gives you a brilliant opportunity to generate media coverage.
Our work on the NewOrbit fundraise is a good example of this.
The story also gives you the chance to land other key messages beyond the fact that you’ve raised money. One very key message you can land is your valuation if that is a number you want to put in the public domain.
A key element of your fundraise announcement should be to create investor fomo.
Investors you spoke to who were thinking about investing but didn’t? This will give them food for thought and maybe the odd sleepless night. Should they have backed it?
Those who weren’t on your radar will now hear about you. And you can bolster your relationships with existing investors by making sure they are mentioned prominently in the piece. This is something we did successfully with all-electric van logistics start up Packfleet for its Series A.
Q: How do I get a journalist to write about my raise?
A: This is the million dollar question. And the answer may not be the one you think it is. For once, it isn’t necessarily all about the money. Business journalists specialising in writing about startups and scaleups are bombarded with stories about raises every day. The very fact of a raise may not be enough to generate interest.
So how do you spark that interest? The news agenda may be your most important friend here.
If your startup is related to topics the media can’t resist, like AI, data centres, electric cars, clean energy, the pensions triple lock or weight loss jabs, there is a good argument to ride the wave of that interest. You don’t want to clash with another big announcement in your sector, but you do want to benefit from the interest in that sector.
Explain clearly how the money you have raised will be spent. This is probably more interesting than the fact you have raised the money in the first place. Are you expanding internationally, hiring people or developing a key technology? That might need to be in the top line of your pitch, rather than the fundraise figure.
Has there been a significant development in your business that is connected to the fundraise? We worked with Octopus Energy when it received investment from Tokyo Gas. The fact that Octopus was entering Japan was at least as interesting to the UK media as the investment story. The fundraise can work as an extra element to a different story.
Do you have a significant investor on board? If you’ve raised £10 million and half of it has come from Jensen Huang, then Jensen Huang is your way into the story, not the £10 million fundraise.
Q: Is there anything else I need to consider?
A: Yes: pictures and pitches.
So many startups and scaleups forget the importance of pictures, or at best thinks about them as an after-thought. High quality, creative images and video can be the difference between a story being published and a story fizzling out.
It’s essential to invest in a good photographer - ideally one who has worked in the media - to take your pictures.
At Harpswood, we have an Image Studio service that delivers professional quality media images for businesses.
And don’t mess up a good story with a poor pitch. When you’re pitching your fundraise story to a journalist, you need to make sure you’re engaging with the right journalists – ones who specialise in your sector or in the startup ecosystem. You must have an eye-catching subject line or your message will be lost. And you must know the most interesting part of your story and be able to sell it in a couple of lines.
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