Sarah Evans shares how she founded her own digital PR agency
Sarah Evans always knew that she wanted to connect people, and she was good at it. As a child, she was always bringing people together and holding events in her neighborhood. But, when she went away to college, she didn’t know what path to take. That’s when she began to research the field of public relations and realized that at its core, PR was about bringing people together. As Sarah says,
“the best PR people really are inclusive and can find a way to tell stories and really get people together.”
Sarah is the founder and CEO of Sevans Strategy, a digital consultancy and “un-agency.” She calls Sevans Strategy an un-agency because of her company’s ability to contract out specific teams rather than using a general team for all clients. Her advice for anyone else who is interested in pursuing PR is to “go for it.” She advises PR hopefuls to create a list of five people who have their dream job and try to set up 15-minute informational interviews to dig deeper into what their job is really like and how they got there.
Sarah presents on the TV show The Doctors.
One of Sarah’s best productivity tips for Google Chrome users is downloading the Toby extension to organize their tabs. Toby allows her to organize tabs by category and by client to make everything easy to find. Sarah’s other key productivity tip is to use Shift. As she says, “Shift was really the answer to what I was looking for.” Shift is a crucial tool that keeps Sarah organized and allows her to use several different logins for accounts, an essential feature when you’re always working with multiple different clients. Within Shift, she has five different Slack channels, Calendly, Zoom, Basecamp, Telegram, WhatsApp, and ClassDojo.
Her productivity routine and time management system allows Sarah to balance running the company she founded, as well as balancing life as a parent. She uses a combination of Todoist tasks, stickies on her screen, and her calendar to keep track of everything. Gmail labels also help Sarah keep track of tasks with different clients.
Sarah's at-home workstation.
As for the future of digital PR specifically, and remote work in general, Sarah says that while some of it is unknown,
“I think one thing the past six months has shown us is that remote work really does work if you can do it.”
And, she’s a veteran of the remote work world with eleven years of experience. As Sarah says, “I think the future of our work is going to be more time invested on how to really connect and have touch points with media, other stakeholders, investors, customers, and potential customers.” But, the challenge is how to do that virtually, with the same effectiveness as in person meetings. Figuring that out will be critical for the future of digital PR.
It’s not only remote work that is bringing new challenges to the table, remote school is bringing its own set of difficulties as well. Sarah’s advice for parents figuring out how to deal with remote learning is to “be easy on yourself,” set up calendar reminders for your kids, and use a headphone splitter if both you and your child need to listen to their teacher at the same time.
Bringing people together and building genuine connections in person is difficult, trying to build those connections virtually can feel like an impossible task. But whether it's bringing her neighborhood together, founding her own digital PR agency, or helping her kids navigate the world of remote education, Sarah has realized that it’s possible to connect people together both in person and digitally, if you simply stay organized, and “be easy on yourself.”
