Public Administration press office: how to work well with limited resources (and without unnecessary risks)

Public administration press offices have the task of guaranteeing citizens' right to information, a mandate established by Law 150/2000, which governs the information and communication activities of Italian public administrations.

A public body's press officer doesn't build brand awareness or defend the interests of a paying client: they produce institutional, neutral and formal communication that follows the entity's political and administrative direction.

But a different mandate doesn't mean simpler challenges.

A press office's most important working tool is the contact list. In public administration, this list is often built up over time by press officers who come and go, with no precise verification procedure or systematic update of the information.

With new outlets opening, others closing, journalists changing outlet or beat, and others asking to be removed from lists, it only takes a few weeks for a contact list to become outdated.

The result is that coverage inevitably declines, press releases fail to reach the right journalists, and the effectiveness of institutional communication is reduced.

Communication inefficiency is not the only risk that public bodies using outdated databases expose themselves to.

GDPR applies to public bodies exactly as it does to private entities: whoever manages a database of journalist contacts is the Data Controller under the regulation, with all the resulting obligations. Responding to deletion requests within the deadlines, ensuring data is kept up to date, and documenting management procedures are all responsibilities that fall on the entity.

Penalties under GDPR can reach up to 4% of annual turnover or €20 million, and in a public context, liability can extend to the responsible manager in the form of financial liability to the public purse.

Most public press offices send press releases through the entity's email program, tools designed for ordinary correspondence, not for mass sends to dozens or hundreds of recipients.

There are two consequences, one technical, the other operational.

• The technical one is that since public entities' mail servers are not configured to handle large volumes of sends, it only takes a few repeated mass sends over time to compromise the institutional domain's reputation and end up on the blacklists of major mail providers. When this happens, the problem can also penalize ordinary communications.
• The operational consequence is that with a standard mail client, which doesn't track opens, doesn't track bounces, doesn't handle automatic removals and produces no sending or open reports, it becomes impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of communications.

Mediaddress is the all-in-one application that covers the entire press office workflow, from the contact database to sending press releases, all the way to monitoring published articles.

For over 35 years, numerous press offices of municipalities, foundations, associations and federations have adopted Mediaddress precisely because it solves the problems described above at their root.

With Mediaddress, the press office has access to an Italy database with over 36,500 constantly updated contacts, thanks to more than 170,000 verifications, 80,000 updates and 3.7 million articles analyzed every year.

The Data Controller for the collection and processing of the data is Mediaddress, which manages consent, updates and deletions. This way, entities are relieved of the responsibilities and obligations set out by GDPR.

In addition, Mediaddress is the first, and to date the only, Italian company in its sector to be certified ISO 9001 and ISO 27001, for data quality and information security: extra protection for the entity, which, in the event of disputes, is also relieved of culpa in vigilando, i.e. the responsibility of having chosen an unreliable supplier.

Mediaddress integrates a professional sending tool that increases the delivery rate of press releases, reduces the risk of ending up in spam, and generates sending and open reports ready to be shared.

From the editor for creating press releases to AI support for building mailing lists, Mediaddress offers everything a press office needs with a single subscription.