What makes Forward Planner superior as a forward planning tool?

Forward Planner is the news planning service of choice for over 100 media organisations, news desks, production departments, picture agencies, press & broadcasters. The service accesses a highly categorised database of 30,000 International sources covering 250,000 events.

What makes the service unique is this content in combination with our brand NEW planning platform with the tools to build your own customised planners, the ability to add your own events & supporting information from across your organisation, along with the ability to export to your own databases & systems.

Who uses our services?

Communications & PR teams, Researchers, Journalists, Assistant Producers, Producers, Editors, Production Assistants, Unit Managers, Publishers, Copy takers, Forward Planners, News teams.........from within departments across 300+ organizations:

• News desks – press & broadcast
• Production Companies
• PR Agencies
• Corporate's
• Public Bodies
• Government
• Financial institutions

Why do people use Forward Planner?

In the Media

Forward Planner is a comprehensive research & planning service for journalists, programmers & executives across the press, news & broadcast programming.

This unique tool allows you to see over 40,000 future events for the coming days, weeks & months that will make the news headlines, influence your programming direction and ensure you keep ahead of the pack…

Many of our clients use the service to enhance or augment existing editorial processes

• Research made quick & easy – just the click of a button
• Advance notice to book snappers, film crews, satellite time, travel & accommodation – for cost efficient logistics
• Sophisticated searches & alerts - finding the information you need quickly & pushing it to you
• Share event information, internal & external, across your organisation
• Add your own information to events and use the service as a team planning tool
• Avoid clashes, conflicts, missing key events – saving time, energy & money
• Export the information to your documents & systems to work on at your leisure
• Tap in to a team of 20+ editorial staff adding & checking over 1,000 items every day

In PR & Communications:

• To spot embarrassing clashes
• To find speaking opportunities for their clients
• To approach journalists in a timely fashion when they know they’re likely to be covering a story, increasing the chance of gaining maximum coverage for their client
• To understand tomorrow’s news agenda today
• To aid client retention (by briefing their clients on and impressing them with their understanding of upcoming opportunities / matters that can affect their business)
• To gain a comprehensive understanding of future happenings in their client’s sectors
• To track future competitor activity
• To have an understanding (outside of their clients sector) of media happenings that can impact their clients
• To find "light" and "heavy" news days. I.e. The best days to get their stories in the press to gain maximum coverage, and the best days to bury bad news.
• To generate creative angles to pitch and win new business.

What unique functionality does Forward Planner offer?

Forward Planner provides:

• A contacts directory of over 30,000 organisations for research & planning
• Tracker tools to monitor an individual or hundreds of organisations
• Email Alerts when you choose, from your saved search criteria
• Sophisticated searches & alerts - finding the information you need quickly & pushing it to you
• My Planner & Team Planner’s to share event information, internal & external, across your organisation
• Tools to export the information to your documents & systems, to work on at your leisure

What information does the service provide?

We collects content from 30,000 organizations on their future events and activity from the weird, quirky & offbeat to global political & economic summits, elections & indicators. All events are highly categorized and include – date, time, organisation, venue, description, contact details, further information & relevant links.

Typical Events include:

Where do we get our information from?

Our Forward Planner editorial team source content from across a wide variety of sources, so that you don’t have to!

Every week we:

• check press cuttings from around the world
• review trade magazines & journals
• read thousands of company press releases
• research websites & portals – through searches & spiders
• canvass & confirm events by telephone
• Track & monitor the IR pages of 6,000 global companies
• Review daily ‘wire’ and RSS sources

How can you be confident of the data quality and accuracy?

Every event in our database is checked and double checked back at source. We have teams of people who check events on various rotas by phone, fax & email. We have CRM systems that track our editorial activity and where event information derived from to ensure you have the most up-to-date & accurate information available.

How can we receive the content?

Content from the service can be provided via the website, as an XML feed, via email alerts or directly exportable as a CSV file. We are happy to discuss individual client requirements.

Can I commission content to be built for me?

Yes – ultimately all our content has been built to meet customer requirements. We work with a number of clients on bespoke projects to build the information they need across our areas of expertise – news, politics, entertainments, lifestyle, business & finance. We have an enviable reputation for delivering projects on-time, in budget and generally more cost efficiently than most companies can achieve themselves.