This is part 1 of a guest blog by Simon Carter, Head of Media Relations for the Scout Association .In January this year Scouting kicked off the centenary celebration of the Cub Scout section. Simon describes how the lessons learned from the 2007 centenary year have been adapted for the 2016 celebration.Stay tuned for part 2 next week!
This is a two-part blog designed to give you some practical ideas for planning the media coverage for your charity’s significant anniversary.
Part One – How to start the year
Background
The team I support masterminded the media relations plan for the centenary of the Scout Association back in 2007. This means there are lots of lessons that were learned at that time that we are using this year. This piece outlines ten key lessons that any charity planning a significant anniversary should think about when they are planning these types of event.
1. Plan, plan, plan and then plan some more
Work out what you want to say and how your anniversary events will complement your strategic plans. If what you are wanting to do around the anniversary fits with your strategic plan then that’s great…… if they don’t fit with where your organisation is going then don’t do them.
There will be lots of pressure to do things that don’t add value. Resist them. Focus really clearly on events and activities that help you get your organisations message across and meet your communications objectives. Plan 5/6 big events and spread them evenly across the course of your year. Ideally go for one event either end of the year and the rest spread across the spring summer and autumn periods when planning large-scale outdoor events will be easier.
2. Get your first event up and running early on in the year and make it work for your key channels.
In 2007 we launched the year with some carefully crafted research. It gave us some great print coverage but we did not get broadcast cut through. This time we wanted to get significant coverage with the broadcasters so we planned accordingly.
The first event we planned was designed to be broadcast friendly and have lots of capacity for regional broadcast pick up. Our centenary kick off event was hosted by one of our partners ZSL at London Zoo. Leaders and Cubs Scouts attended this event from all the ITV regions. By working with the BBC News and giving them and exclusive network story to tell we generated some excellent network coverage that ran on BBC Breakfast, all day on the news channel and appeared in a slightly shortened form on the BBC1 six o’clock and ten o’clock main news slots.
In the last couple of years ITV have invested in a unit that takes national stories and regionalises them. It’s worth talking to this team to help you get that regional broadcast cut through,
The BBC network coverage was followed up on the Monday by ten pieces of regional ITV coverage featuring young people from each home ITV region. The pieces also were posted on line and can be seen here.
3. Pace yourself
It’s a marathon not a sprint. Your comms team will love the experience but they will be “on it” all year so plan for 5/6 big events and really push on those events hard. Make careful choices about where you put your efforts or your team will burn out pretty quickl
4. Harness digital
In 2007 Twitter had only just started and Facebook was also in its very early stages. This time round things are different. A tweet from our Chief Scout @beargrylls reaches more people than many national daily papers. As well as using social media we plan to use digital power to the max buy encouraging our local supporters to use pre-prepared content to get our messages out there using their own social media channels. This link shows the material we have prepared to support local communications work by our volunteer teams
Once each anniversary event takes place make sure you have a way of capturing what’s happened so you can make use of that content with local and regional media. This is our story-gathering tool.
The material fed into the system gets used to generate local, regional and National stories across the UK
Make sure you have a widely used hashtag. Check out #Cubs100 to see how we are doing.
Generate some special anniversary content that works on social media for your supporters to share – here is one of the pieces we have created.
Simon will be sharing more lessons about charity anniversary campaigns in part 2 next week.
Find out what The Scout Association’s CEO, Matt Hyde, thinks about marketing in my blog on ‘What every CEO should know about marketing.’