What should I ask a PR agency before hiring them?

Most PR agencies will tell you they are strategic, senior, and results-driven. Most of them mean it. The question is whether what they mean by those words matches what you need.

Here are the questions that cut through the pitch.

Who will actually work on our account?

This is the question agencies are least comfortable answering honestly. The people who present at the pitch are rarely the people who do the day-to-day work. Ask directly: who will be our primary contact? What is their level of experience? How many other accounts are they managing? Will the senior person who presented to us be involved in our account, and if so, how often and in what capacity?

The gap between who sells the work and who delivers it is the most common source of disappointment in agency relationships.

How do you measure success?

Media coverage is an output, not an outcome. Before you agree on metrics, make sure you understand what the coverage is supposed to achieve. Brand awareness? Investor confidence? Talent attraction? Policy influence? A good agency connects media activity to business objectives and tracks whether the coverage is actually reaching the right audiences and moving the right needle.

Be cautious of agencies that lead with volume metrics — number of pieces of coverage, reach figures, advertising value equivalents. These numbers are easy to generate and often meaningless.

How do you pitch stories?

This question reveals more than almost any other. A sophisticated agency will talk about understanding publication DNA, identifying editorial timing, and building genuine relationships with journalists over time. A less sophisticated one will talk about press release distribution and media lists.

Ask them to walk you through how they would approach a specific story for your organisation. The quality of that answer will tell you whether they understand how journalism actually works.

What does your media network actually look like?

Relationships with journalists are the currency of PR. Ask which journalists they have genuine relationships with in your sector and how those relationships were built. A media list and a real relationship are very different things. The former is a database. The latter is built over years of giving journalists things they actually want.

How do you handle a story that goes wrong?

Every organisation eventually faces a situation where the media coverage is not what they hoped for. Ask the agency how they have handled difficult situations for other clients and what their crisis communications capability looks like. If they struggle to answer this question, that tells you something important.

What will you need from us to be effective?

A good agency will be honest about what they need from the client to do their job well. Access to subject matter experts. Timely approvals. A clear decision-making process. Willingness to have genuine opinions in public. If an agency tells you they can work effectively without any of these things, they are either being optimistic or they are planning to produce coverage that does not require them.