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Edmonton Catholic Schools


In 1888, three sisters from the order of the Faithful Companions of Jesus founded the first Catholic school in Edmonton. Today, the publicly funded Edmonton Catholic School District (ECSD) teaches more than 41,000 students in 90 schools. To monitor and manage their media coverage, they put their faith in Meltwater.

Meltwater Enables the Edmonton Catholic School District to

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Capture all local media coverage and access reliable data

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Easily create appealing dashboards and reports with customized KPIs

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Quickly and efficiently share top news with school officials

Challenge

Piecemeal Coverage and Reporting 

After finding too many pages missing from the stories they were forwarded, the ECSD communications team decided to switch providers. Cision's platform wasn't user friendly, and it didn't include coverage from a number of local media outlets. ECSD's Communications Coordinator, Dana Prefontaine, says, "Cision didn't have access to some of the media we wanted. So we'd get some clippings faxed to us, and other articles we had to go print out. Reporting under these circumstances wasn't easy."

Communication's Coordinator, Courtney Naccarato, adds, "The daily report became such a chore. Coverage was in a bunch of different places, so it was really cumbersome, and the data felt unreliable."

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Courtney Naccarato, Communications Coordinator

"Our rep is super responsive and we have a direct line. With Cision there was no phone number and your email went into a general inbox. You never knew what would happen."

Courtney Naccarato, Communications Coordinator

Solution

A Complete Platform 

For the past year, the communications team has been using Meltwater to monitor and report on coverage relevant to the school district. Meltwater provides a breadth of stories and draws heavily from local sources across Canada. The platform's customizable dashboards provide a quick, in-depth look at the metrics ECSD deems important: social media influencers, trending topics, and the school's overall sentiment. The dashboard's top stories feed into their daily newsletter, which is sent to the district's trustees, senior administrators, and school operations staff, ensuring top officials are in the know. Meltwater is much more than a monitoring tool—they understand that the client relationship matters most.

Summary

Meltwater Helps the Edmonton Catholic School District 

Ensure nothing is missed from regional and local media 

"Meltwater pulls from so many different sources. We track the Edmonton Examiner, the Edmonton Metro, the Edmonton Journal, some stories in the National Post, and more. With Cision, we were missing stories from regional and local outlets." 

— Dana Prefontaine, Communications Team Coordinator 

Easily share stories and findings with school administrators 

"We love the newsletter— it's clean, easy to read, and takes you directly to the article. The entire platform is user friendly which makes sharing the most important metrics with our directors a one-step process." 

— Courtney Naccarato, Communications Team Coordinator 

Proactive consultation from experienced Customer Success reps 

"Meltwater has been very responsive when we reach out. I've sent a few emails saying we need to tweak this or change that, and asking how to do this or that. Our rep has been wonderful and always takes time to walk us through the solutions. Being in customer service, that's very important to me."

— Lori Nagy, Manager of Media and Community Relations  

Screenshot of Meltwater Dashboards