“Alerts keep me, my team, and all of our key stakeholders up to date on critical conversations as they are evolving and escalating.”
- Stephanie Smart, Senior Analytics Specialist, Strategic Insights, Orchestra
Orchestra is a strategic communications firm that leverages data to help organizations transform uncertainty into action, defining the current moment rather than reacting to it. Their clients — spanning industries from beauty and legal to consumer goods — rely on them to surface intelligence fast, interpret it accurately, and get it to the right people before the story moves on without them. As a firm that handles high-visibility brand moments, crisis situations, and influencer strategy across a broad client portfolio, being first to know isn’t a competitive advantage. It’s the baseline.
With Tubular Alerts, Orchestra’s analytics team designed an always-on intelligence system that automatically delivers the right signals — whenever thresholds are met — to every stakeholder who needs them. The result: 2.5 hours freed per analyst per week, zero news cycles missed on monitored situations, and a small team of Tubular seat holders with the reach and responsiveness of a team twice their size.
Designing for speed in a high-stakes environment
Stephanie Smart was hired for crisis analytics. That means her day-to-day isn’t brand campaigns or content calendars — it’s legal cases, supplier controversies, policy shifts, and the brand moments that can define or damage a client’s reputation in a single news cycle. The intelligence she surfaces directly informs how PR teams respond, how strategists advise, and how clients protect their standing in fast-moving public conversations.
Orchestra had the right data. Stephanie had built robust dashboards and saved searches in Tubular, organized around each client’s specific risk profile and tailored to the dynamics of each situation. For a high-profile legal case that spurred massive public conversation, the relevant signal was a surge in views or engagements from influential accounts. For a quieter supplier controversy where any new activity could be meaningful, a single new upload might be the early warning sign that a previously dormant conversation was re-igniting.
The analytical infrastructure was strong. But monitoring for change — especially across multiple clients and situations simultaneously — required constant manual attention. The challenge wasn’t finding the right data when you looked. It was knowing when to look.
A system configured once, watching continuously
When Tubular Alerts became available, Stephanie saw immediately how it could extend her team’s capabilities. She configured alerts directly on her existing dashboards, setting thresholds for the metrics that mattered most to each client situation. On any day those thresholds are crossed, a notification is delivered directly to the relevant stakeholders. On quieter days, the system simply keeps watching.
That distinction matters. Stephanie often sets alerts on situations she hopes will stay quiet — monitoring proactively, without any expectation of activity. The value isn’t just in the notification itself. It’s in the confidence that if something changes, she’ll know about it without having to check.
She configured alerts differently for each client scenario. For high-visibility cases, she set thresholds around volume and engagement from influential creators and news outlets. For smaller, niche controversies, she used upload-level triggers to catch the earliest signs of a re-emerging conversation. And for some dashboards, she set up both views and engagements alerts simultaneously — ensuring both the reach and the resonance of content were tracked independently.
Each alert was routed to the full stakeholder group: analytics colleagues, PR counterparts, and senior strategists, all receiving the same intelligence on the same day. “Keeping everyone up to date with the same knowledge base at the same time — that’s the real value,” Stephanie explains. “When teams come to us with questions, we have a shared starting point to dig deeper and give them what they need.”
What Alerts didn’t change was Stephanie’s role as the expert her team relies on. She remained the first call when teams needed deeper analysis, additional context, or strategic interpretation. “These teams can feel confident in the fact that I set this up for them,” she says. “I still have a place in this as the Tubular expert — they can come to me with questions, ask for more details or more data. I stay in the loop, but I’m there when they actually need me.”
Challenge
Orchestra’s analytics team needed a smarter way to monitor fast-moving and unpredictable client situations across dashboards — without requiring constant manual check-ins to catch meaningful changes as they happened.
Action
Using Tubular Alerts, Stephanie configured a tailored threshold-based alert system across existing dashboards, setting distinct trigger conditions for each client scenario. On any day thresholds are crossed, notifications are delivered simultaneously to the full stakeholder group — analytics, PR, and strategy — creating a shared intelligence baseline across the entire team.
Growth
- ~2.5 hours freed per analyst, per week — redirected from routine check-ins toward deeper strategic analysis and client counsel
- Zero news cycles missed on monitored situations — proactively configured alerts flagged a dormant legal crisis the day it resurfaced, before any manual review would have caught it
- Simultaneous cross-team alignment across PR, analytics, and strategy on any day a threshold is crossed
- Expert-designed, team-wide reach — a small group of seat holders delivering platform-grade intelligence to a much larger stakeholder group, configured by the people who understand the data most deeply
- Influencer intelligence accelerated — emerging creator signals now informing Orchestra’s growing influencer practice, arming PR teams with data to make informed partnership decisions
Tubular: Can you walk us through how you use Tubular Alerts?
SS: A lot of the projects I work on are crisis-focused, or if not crisis, then high-visibility brand moments — a merger, a policy change, a beauty company shifting their formula or working with a new supplier that’s generating conversation. I’ll set up alerts to monitor things like any mentions of a client and their supplier to watch for any changes in that conversation over time. A lot of the time, I’m setting these up for situations that I hope stay quiet. The value is knowing that if something does change, I’ll find out — without having to go back and check every day.
I also set up separate views and engagements alerts on the same dashboard, just to make sure my bases are covered. Views and engagements often overlap, but sometimes there are meaningful differences based on post performance or creator dynamics, and I want visibility into both.
T: Was there a moment where Alerts really proved its value?
SS: There was a legal case I had set up an alert for that had been quiet for months. I honestly thought it might give me one email a week, maybe. Then all of a sudden, notifications started coming in. The case had a resurgence, there were new legal developments, and people were talking about it again. I went straight to Google to confirm what I was seeing, looked at the content, and then messaged my team right away. It did exactly what it was supposed to do — it kept watch on something I couldn’t monitor every single day, and flagged it the moment it became relevant again.
T: How has it changed the way your team works together?
SS: The big shift is that everyone is working from the same information. When an alert goes out, our PR teams, strategists, and analytics colleagues all see it on the same day. So when they come to us with questions, we already have a shared starting point — we know what they saw, what content triggered it, and we can go deeper from there. It gives us a much faster path to giving them what they need, whether that’s additional context, links, data, or a recommendation on how to respond.
T: What would you tell another analyst thinking about using Alerts for crisis monitoring?
SS: Think about what kind of signal matters for each specific situation. For a high-profile case where there’s already a lot of conversation, you want to be watching views and engagements — you want to see the content that’s shaping or driving the narrative, especially from creators and outlets with real influence. For something smaller and more niche, where you’re watching for any activity at all, upload-level triggers are more relevant — going from no conversation to even a couple of posts is the signal you care about. The beauty of it is that you can set it up differently for every situation. And then you can focus on other things, knowing that if something changes, you’ll know about it. Making sure our teams have the most accurate information possible is super critical — it helps them do their jobs better. Alerts makes that happen automatically. I’m genuinely excited to see where it goes from here.
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