Dana Whitfield, Research Director
Dana designs the questionnaires, owns sampling quality, and writes the reports.
Dana spent twelve years in agency PR in New York and London, most recently as a communications director running technology accounts. In that time she personally commissioned, bought, and abandoned more PR software than she admits to publicly - which is exactly why she started fielding surveys on how these tools get bought.
She founded PR Signal Research in 2024 to field the studies vendors would never run themselves: trust in review sources, how stacks get assembled, and whether the tools buyers pick are the tools that deliver. She has personally commissioned PR software for four agencies and brings that buyer's skepticism to every study.
Recent work
The 2026 PR Tools Buyer Trust Report - design and analysis
The PR Team Stacking Study - design and analysis
Why vendor comparisons rank first on Google - analysis
On the record
"Every PR team we surveyed has been burned by a comparison page that turned out to be an ad. The 68 percent figure is not cynicism - it is experience. The fix is not to stop reading reviews; it is to check who wrote them." - from the Buyer Trust Report's preface.
"Sampling quality is the whole game. If your panel skews toward vendors' own customers, your study measures marketing, not reality. We screen for that." - on methodology.
Where she publishes
Dana's reports and insights appear exclusively on this site. She occasionally speaks on research methods for PR and communications teams, and reviews questionnaire design as a paid discipline. Media inquiries reach her via the practice's about page.
Her review rule
Dana reads every vendor comparison page the practice cites, start to finish, before its claims enter a report. If the page cannot survive a full read, its data does not survive into ours.