Every profession has various set rules when it comes to following standard software & tools, and so does the profession of Public Relations. But the beauty for a communications professional is the fact that this standardisation is fairly limited for us. We all are largely free to experiment and work as per our individual choice as long as the work gets done.

A PR professionals wears many hats at one time and in order to fulfil all those responsibilities, she/he uses several public relations tools.

Having been in the profession for a few years now, I have a list of tools that I love to use. They are my favourite for a lot of reasons which are listed below:

1. Microsoft Office: This is the most important tool in the life of every PR professional. All of us use MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Outlook and MS Excel on a daily basis. The ease of accessing your emails, writing articles, creating creative presentations and crunching numbers is brilliant. MS Excel sheet allows one to not only maintain lists but also sort them in a highly customised manner to improve efficiency. This is just one of the functions I have pointed out. I doubt if any of us, uses the apps offered by Microsoft to their full potential

2. Evernote: Whether you are an engineer, an MBA or a mass communication graduate, we have the need to take notes. While I do resort to the traditional paper and pen a lot of times my favourite app for the purpose is Evernote. Evernote enables me take text notes, picture notes and also helps me save documents. Its search capability is fabulous and I can stack my notes in different notebooks. What is most brilliant is that my Evernote can also read texts from the images saved in it. I can sync all Evernote notes on all my devices and across platforms. It gives me a feeling of carrying information stored in 10 notebooks in my pocket.

3. Piktochart: As PR practitioners we need to take a lot of tasks in our own hands. I have often made infographics to prepare a creative pitch or posting a complex data on my client’s social media page. While there are a lot of infographic making apps available in the market, Piktochart is my favourite. It allows me to work on readymade templates- reports, infographics, posters etc. It also gives me a lot of deigning options while creating a particular infographic.

4. PicMonkey: A communications professional often needs a photo editing application for various purposes. I personally like the web application called PicMonkey for re-sizing the images for different social media platforms, cropping, adjusting and for other editing options. One can complete most of their tasks through the free tools that this application has to offer.

5. YouTube: Video content is one of the most popular selling contents on the internet today. As communications professionals we often have the need to upload brand content on the internet. I am sure most of you will agree that YouTube is the best way to put your video content out there. It not only allows you to upload a video but also edit it to your requirements. One may also choose the option of keeping their videos private or be selectively available to a few users only. After the video is uploaded I can easily view how many people have viewed the film I have uploaded.

– Radhika Nandwani

Radhika is the Corporate Communications Advisor at Dell’s Performance Analytics Group. She started her career in 2011, with one of the leading public relations firms of India – MSLGROUP, specialising in technology brands. The campaigns executed by her while at MSL, have won several public relations industry awards including SABRE and PR Week Asia. In her last role, she was the founding team member and the marketing communications manager at SCoRe. Radhika is an English graduate and holds a Master’s degree in Mass Communication. She loves reading and is passionate about gender equality, food and Bollywood. She can be reached at @RadhikaNandwani on Twitter and here on LinkedIn.