What goes in a press kit and boilerplate?

A press kit is six assets a reporter can grab without emailing you: boilerplate, founder bios, logos, product shots, fast facts, and a press contact. The visuals matter: in Cision's survey, 71% of journalists said they always or often use multimedia, so the images and logos you supply often end up in the story. The boilerplate is the two-to-four-sentence "about" paragraph that closes every press release. An agency can draft the whole kit in a day or two once you hand over the raw material, and a competent one finishes it inside the first two weeks of onboarding.

This is the cheapest item on a PR menu, one-time and low stakes, so judge it on completeness rather than polish. Your role is narrow: supply the facts fast, then approve the boilerplate carefully, because a wrong number there ends up verbatim in every story that runs.

What a complete kit holds, and who supplies what:

• Boilerplate - the standing "about" paragraph. The agency drafts it from the messaging work (see the messaging-and-positioning page); you own every claim in it, especially funding and customer counts.
• Founder and exec bios - one short, one long. Only you have the real history. Hand it over raw and let the agency cut.
• Logos and brand assets - high resolution, transparent background, a design file rather than a screenshot.
• Product screenshots or photos - images a reporter can drop straight into a story without asking permission.
• Fast facts - founding year, headquarters, headcount, and the one metric you will defend on the record.
• Press contact - a shared inbox someone checks daily. A reporter on deadline emails once and moves on.

Everything except the boilerplate starts as material only you can provide, which makes the kit a useful early read on both sides. A kit that drags past a month usually means the client never sent the inputs. An agency that bills the kit as a major standalone deliverable, or charges separately for it, is padding the scope. Send the raw material in week one and budget about an hour of your own time for review.

One caution on the boilerplate itself: it ages. Treat any funding round, headcount jump, or rebrand as a trigger to reissue it, and route the update through whatever sign-off process you set up (the approval-workflows page covers that). Reporters copy whatever version they find.