HRtech Company Achieves Its Hefty Fundraising, Visibility Ambitions through the Power of PR
15Five delivers a strategic performance management platform that drives action and impact, helping businesses and their people thrive. The company’s technology empowers HR leaders with data-driven insights and recommendations while transforming managers into changemakers, accelerating engagement, performance and retention.
Challenge
The client came to Bospar at a critical stage. It was looking to raise a substantial sum for a breakout Series C round. That was a tall order in the crowded HR tech space, where competitors included heavy hitters like Betterworks, Reflektive, Lattice and Workday.
The client’s hefty ambitions didn’t end at the funding raise. It also wanted every CHRO and CMO to know its name.
To excite both potential investors and the HR tech industry, the client needed new messaging and positioning and a strategy to pursue bold narratives.
PR had to set the stage in its collaboration with the client to garner more coverage for the announcement than any other HR tech company with similar results.
Strategy
The team opened with a data-driven PR credibility play: a survey designed to prove the client’s value to investors before a single pitch went out. The numbers delivered. Over three-fourths of respondents said its platform made them better managers and delivered improved business outcomes like increased billable revenue, better employee productivity and reduced turnover.
The survey’s results validated the messaging PR would take to the media: the client’s platform was proven to grow a company’s bottom line. With messaging locked, PR set out to make the client a fixture in every major HR tech conversation, from remote work to employee wellness.
Our public relations experts knew the timing was right, with the Great Resignation dominating headlines. Journalists were hungry for an angle that wasn’t a rehash of the same story.
The Bospar PR team leaned into the moment, highlighting that the client’s new funding was proof companies needed to invest now in retaining and motivating top talent. For reporters who cover workplace trends more than funding rounds, the team flipped the frame: The raise was the news hook to resurface the client’s earlier Great Resignation research, giving those journalists a timely reason to cover a study that had already proven its relevance.
To maximize coverage at launch, PR ran a coordinated media embargo strategy, pre-briefing reporters under embargo ahead of the announcement. We paired that with analyst commentary mobilized across social media to amplify reach the moment the news broke.
Bospar’s media strategy proved successful, garnering headlines in publications like HR Executive (Phil Albinus reporting), Forbes (Jennifer Jay Palumbo reporting) and SHRM (John Egan reporting). This new visibility catapulted the client to close on $52 million in its Series C round.
The subsequent Series C funding announcement generated a mountain of coverage in top-tier and trade outlets, including:
- Business Insider (Hasan Chowdhury reporting)
- TechCrunch (Ingrid Lunden reporting)
- Fortune (Jessica Mathews reporting)
- The Wall Street Journal (Marc Vartabedian reporting)
- Axios (Kia Kokalitcheva reporting)
- SiliconANGLE (Mike Wheatley reporting)
- Built In San Francisco (Charli Renken reporting)
- Grit Daily News (Spencer Hulse reporting)
- Reworked (Mike Prokopeak reporting)
The client left competitors in the dust on social, in total impressions and in the quality of feature coverage.
“We earned a huge amount of coverage in top-tier outlets, HR trades, places where we want to appear, we want to exhibit our brand. We were all over LinkedIn, and we received a huge influx of web traffic in the days just following the press release and funding announcement. ”
— David Mizne, senior marketing communications manager at 15Five
