New York Newspaper Increases Notices Volume by Over 35%

PROBLEM

The Daily Gazette — an independent, family-owned newspaper in Schenectady, New York — was already trying to improve its public notice process when its largest legals client — Registered Agents Inc (RAI) — reached out to them. “They said, ‘hey, processing all these legals is too much of a hassle,” quoted Bob O’leary, the VP of advertising at the Daily Gazette, “and they asked for our help figuring out how to streamline the process. They wanted an integration.”

At that point, RAI was processing upwards of 200 notices monthly with the Daily Gazette and an important client for the paper.

“We were all definitely on the same page,” emphasized O’leary. In fact, O’leary’s certain that most papers agree when thinking about how to increase efficiencies and improve the notice process for valuable customers. “Any newspaper in the country who’s running legal notices wants to increase volume, revenue, and streamline the process,” O’leary said. “They will want to do it now.”

“It took too much time,” said Andrew Corsberg, who works in the legal department at RAI, “not to mention when you add a human into the equation. Humans are prone to make errors, and this is a legal notice. Anything we mess up — because someone inputs the wrong name or didn’t type out the proper date — creates downstream headaches for our clients.”

Corsberg unpacked all the manual steps the RAI team had to do to place all their legals. First, they had to input the notice information over three different times — into their CMS, into their daily portal and their weekly portal, as well as to update any other items in their database.

“All that manual entry was ripe for problems,” Corsberg emphasized. “We’d have five people spending an hour trying to get the proper information, manually input it into websites, suffer through a billion buffering issues, re-type information, re-update our database. You can see how many problems can arise.”

“My number one priority is running my newspaper well,” said O’leary. “I knew our legals business had to be better for our customers and us. We were committed to finding a solution.”

SOLUTION

O’leary first heard about Column at Mega-conference last year when his longtime friend Jim Fogler, President of the Florida Press Association, introduced O’leary to the Column team. After his conversation with

RAI, O’leary reached back out to Column to see if they could work together to automate notice placement for their high-volume client. “I told Column that we wanted to create an integration for RAI that would make their life and our life easier,” said O’leary, “and Column told us that they could help.”

“We saw the long-term value in what Column was offering right away,” said Corsberg. “If they could help us streamline the process, we could increase notice volume, have more competitive prices, and provide a better service to our clients.”

“I wanted to please my customer and I wanted to grow volume,” added O’leary. “That was my reason. It was simple. Column understood and so did Registered Agents.”

The whole process took only four months. “Four months was a short window to build something like that,” said O’leary, “but they got it done.”

“We were all a team,” added Corsberg. “Every week, we made progress. Everybody involved understood exactly what we were trying to do.”

IMPACT

Since the Column integration, the Daily Gazette has experienced a 35% increase in notice submissions from Registered Agents due to the efficiency of the new process and massive time savings.

“The manual labor has been reduced to a button click,” said Corsberg. “Five minutes go by, and it’s done.” O’leary said, ” Even though we were building something new, Column was incredibly responsive and attentive to our needs.”

Because of the ease of the process, RAI chose to work with Column again to build an integration for their weekly publications in New York. “It’s because of how quick Column’s team is to respond, to accommodate requests, and how quick they are to implement,” said Corsberg. Their priorities are in line with ours. It was an easy, no-brainer to work with Column again. History was made last fall.”

ENRIQUE DIAZ Account Executive II Column, PBC. 305-431-1224 enrique@column.us

BOB O’LEARY Vice President of Advertising, Daily Gazette | Amsterdam Recorder | The Leader Herald 518-395-3154 boleary@dailygazette.net

ANDREW CORSBERG In-house Counsel, Registered Agents Inc (307) 200-2803 support@registeredagentsinc.com