I am Vicki Jenkins, Principal Advisor – AR and Client Services at NelsonHall. With a background as an analyst relations (AR) professional, an industry analyst, and now serving in a client services role working closely with our AR contacts, I have seen what happens on both sides of the fence. Communication between the two sides is not always easy to navigate, so in an effort to make working with NelsonHall as smooth as possible, we developed an AR Portal.

There are three main areas within the portal:

• Plan Ahead – here you’ll find NelsonHall’s project scheduler, which allows you to plan your participation in NelsonHall projects and keep track of key milestones, from projection initiation through to final publication of all the key reports in the project
• Get Engaged – here you’ll find information on how to get the most from your engagement with NelsonHall, including the benefits of project participation and the importance of providing client references
• Be Connected – here you can sign up to NelsonHall’s regular newsletter as well as to email alerts for specific research programs and specific vendor organizations.

Our goal is to make the portal easy to use. For example, we surveyed our AR contacts and learned of some improvements we could make to our project scheduler. We appreciated those suggestions and moved the project scheduler to a spreadsheet format, added key milestone dates throughout the NelsonHall project lifecycle, and we enabled real-time updates. In addition, we have added project descriptions to  the scheduler. We encourage you to review the latest project schedules, identify projects of interest, reach out to us with any questions, add participation in those projects to your internal plan, and track the progress of projects in which your organization is participating.

Also, take a look at the documents in the Get Engaged section of the portal. The documents in this section are proving to be very helpful for new AR team members (and extensions of AR teams) in areas such as marketing and strategy. We know it can be difficult to gain the time of executives and SMEs to participate in industry analyst projects, so we have also included information on the benefits of participating in our projects.

I have had the pleasure of providing tours of the AR Portal to many of our AR contacts. I have collected great content suggestions during those tours, and I am working on developing that content for the portal. If you have not had a chance to have a tour yet, please let me know and I would be happy to arrange one for you. If you have new people join your team or your extended team, I would be happy to grant them access to the portal and provide them with a tour.

The portal is quite new, and we are always interested in your content suggestions. We want to make sure the portal content is useful for members of your AR team, extended AR team, and you. We look forward to your suggestions!