Clientversary: The Hampton Trust

The Sunny Bird PR team is celebrating its ‘clientversary’ with The Hampton Trust. Established in 1996, The Hampton Trust is an award-winning domestic abuse charity which delivers domestic violence perpetrator programs within the criminal justice system to reduce re-offending. The charity first approached the team with two objectives; to raise awareness of the work of The Hampton Trust in both regional and national press, educating those in the third sector industry and the wider public on their services and expertise, we’ve gone above and beyond securing 40 pieces of coverage for the charity over 12 months, reaching over 7.7 million people, with an advertising value equivalent of over £287,000!

To achieve these results , Sunny Bird PR ensured The Hampton Trust were considered experts in their field placed side-by-side with their competitors, other high profile domestic abuse charities. As well as this, we shone a light on the innovative work the charity are doing and we have made sure that the press are continually up to date with their program offerings. We are always scouring the press for reactive opportunities also, recently securing regular coverage in The Daily Express, with comments from Chantal Hughes, CEO of the Hampton Trust, on Coronation Streets coercive control story line, these pieces of coverage reached over 3.6 million people!

Here are some more examples of the work we’ve achieved for The Hampton Trust over the last 12 months:

CARA Workshop Press Visits

SBPR interviewed an attendee of one of The Hampton Trust’s CARA (Caution and Relationship Abuse) workshops and compiled a feature for the national press. This feature resulted in journalists from both Cosmopolitan Magazine and The Daily Telegraph visiting CARA workshops for themselves and compiling high-profile features in 2020, due to reach over 523,000 people.

CEO Profile

To ensure The Hampton Trust was positioned as the voice of authority in its sector, the SBPR team complied a feature on the CEO of the charity Chantal Hughes. This feature led to a series of exclusive opinion pieces running in Third Sector online, a coveted publication read by 123,000 voluntary sector workers.

Woman & Home Awards

SBPR nominated Chantal for the Woman & Home Awards, which champion women doing extraordinary things, in the ‘Changing our Country’ category. Chantal won the award in 2019, attending a photoshoot and a high-profile awards ceremony at London’s Claridge’s. This raised the profile of The Hampton Trust not only to the attendees, but to the 237,000 readers of Woman & Home Magazine.  To celebrate Chantal receiving this award SBPR complied a post event press-release, sharing the news with the regional press and achieving further coverage, which reached over 186,000 people.

Reacting to Television

The SBPR team know the importance of reactive media opportunities, and for The Hampton Trust we knew that prolific television storylines would bring domestic abuse into the public eye and into the news. Making sure we were up to date with the content of primetime soaps and dramas meant the team secured interview opportunities for Chantal in the Metro Online, the Daily Express Online and Tyla Online. These pieces of coverage reached over 4 million people, establishing The Hampton Trust as experts in the field and raising awareness of the charity as a go-to for comments on domestic abuse news for the national press.

Project White Ribbon Day

White Ribbon Day, and the 16 Days of Action is an annual event which raises awareness of domestic abuse against women. The SBPR team compiled press releases to highlight all of the work The Hampton Trust carried out during this time to raise awareness. The team also pitched Chantal as a spokesperson to target titles and broadcast media. The team’s PR activity secured 10 pieces of coverage for The Hampton Trust, including three features on the BBC South Today TV news programme, reaching over 2.7 million people.  

Regional Press

SBPR knew the importance of highlighting the work of The Hampton Trust to those who would need it the most, so the team ensured that regional press was given updates on essential news from The Hampton Trust. We secured 25 pieces of coverage for The Hampton Trust in Avon & Somerset, Hampshire, Dorset and the West Midlands, across broadcast, radio, online and print press raising awareness of the CARA workshops, the link up with the regional Police and the Hampton Trust’s ADAPT (Accredited Domestic Abuse Prevention Training) program. All of this coverage reached over 3.2 million people and would have cost over £29,000 in advertising!

We have loved working with The Hampton Trust over the last 12 months and are pleased to continue working with them in 2020.

Clientversary: Bournemouth Collegiate School

The Sunny Bird PR team is celebrating its one year ‘clientversary’ with Bournemouth Collegiate School. The independent school first approached the team with two objectives; to increase the school’s enrolment figures through regional press and raise the profile of the school on a national level by highlighting its USPs and sought-after sports facilities.

To do this, Sunny Bird PR developed a strong media relations campaign to ensure BCS was featured in its target publications year round. To assess how and where to focus our media presence we conducted an initial survey of parents to discover where they heard about the school and what they thought about it to provide us with knowledge and focus for our approach. We discovered that 64% of parents discovered BCS through word of mouth and local news, which became a core focus of our PR strategy. We knew that regionally, local pupil success stories are always well read with friends and families sharing the news to their wider network on and offline. Each month, we produced several stories championing the pupils’ success from Wimbledon tournaments, to literary awards and everything in between. With the pupils at BCS being such a talented and high achieving bunch, we were never short of material and managed to secure 28 pupil-led stories in key regional publications throughout the year.

Our second approach was to establish the school and its teachers as education experts and leaders in their disciplines. To do this we worked closely with the school’s headmaster Mr Russell Slatford to identify newsworthy topics and trends in education which he could comment on. We targeted key journalists in the national and education press and offered them exclusive opinion pieces or interviews with the headmaster himself. Over the year we secured 14 comment opportunities for Mr Slatford on a wide range of topics including Brexit, charity work, school uniforms, the importance of sport and iGCSEs. The long form interviews were featured in a plethora of trade titles and pitched to national press ensuring BCS was firmly in the contact books of national education journalists and broadcasters including the likes of The Daily Telegraph and Channel 5 news.

Alongside championing the school’s pupils and staff we created features to highlight BCS’ unique offerings such as the prep’s Forest School and the senior sports academies, interviewing Heads of Departments as well as pupils about their experiences. Through this tactic we were able to highlight the school’s core philosophy of providing ‘education with character’ and place it in magazines and newspapers read by prospective and existing parents.

In total, over the past 12 months SBPR achieved 64 pieces of coverage for the school in target titles including in The Daily Telegraph, Schools Week, Country & Town House, Education Investor Global, Independent Education Today, Dorset Life, Wiltshire Life, The Lymington Times and the Daily Echo. That is an average of five pieces per month which reached more than 1.5 million people!

Clientversary: The Green House Hotel

Sunny Bird PR is celebrating its two-year clientversary with The Green House Hotel and what a year it’s been! Over the past 12 months, we’ve secured 66 pieces of coverage in a plethora of prestigious titles such as The Daily Telegraph, Time Out, The Independent, Country Living, National Geographic Traveller as well as key wedding magazines, reaching more than 7 million people!

Having introduced the hotel to the wider consumer press and travel publications during our first year of PR activity, this year The Green House Hotel wanted to focus on securing long-form press reviews in targeted consumer publications as well as increasing its wedding bookings by securing more articles in the sought after wedding press.

With the Bridal press being notoriously hard to place articles in without advertising spend, the team came up with creative concepts which would be guaranteed to get press. To do this, we worked alongside the hotel to launch the UK’s first ever Vegan Wedding Package, allowing brides and grooms to design their wedding around sustainable principles.

The package was inspired by the nation’s growing vegan population which now includes more than 3.5 million people and the increasing space dedicated to a vegan lifestyle in newspapers, magazines and online. To create the package, we reached out to vegan suppliers, from Fairtrade dress designers to cruelty-free make-up artists and created an extensive list of suppliers the hotel’s wedding planners could use to ensure the day was beautiful as well as kind to the environment.  The Vegan Wedding Package includes a fully vegan à la carte menu as well as Fairtrade UK flowers which don’t need importing therefore reducing the carbon footprint of the wedding. By creating a first-of-its-kind package, we created something new which journalists were interested in which resulted in coverage in publications including Bride, Your Wedding Magazine, Wedding Ideas, The Kind Bride, Vegan Living, Veg News and The Independent to name a few. In total, the team achieved 19 pieces of coverage for the Vegan Wedding Package which reached almost 2 million people!

To ensure the hotel was front of mind for loved up couples year-round, we conducted a second campaign capitalising up on the success of our previous Carbon Wedding campaign. SBPR worked with Bournemouth-based carbon counting company Count On Me to work out the carbon cost of a honeymoon in Thailand, America, and at The Green House Hotel. Honeymoons in Thailand and America worked out in excess of 15 tonnes of carbon compared to just 0.5 tonnes for a stay at The Green House Hotel. We pitched these facts and figures to key journalists along with a case study of a couple who had honeymooned at the hotel to secure future coverage. The Carbon Honeymoon campaign was featured six times across the wedding publications including double page spreads in Your Wedding Magazine, Green Union and To Have and To Hold.

Throughout the year, the team also organised press trips to truly highlight the hotel’s USPs as a sustainable holiday destination. We invited journalists from respected titles including The Daily Telegraph, Metro.co.uk, Red magazine, Women’s Health, My Weekly, The Ecologist and The Wharf magazine to stay and dine at the hotel. Each of the journalists explored the sights of the local area and dined at the award-winning fully sustainable hotel restaurant, the Arbor restaurant, during their stay to get the full hotel experience, resulting in long-form reviews and features read by millions.

It’s certainly been an exciting year working with The Green House Hotel over the last 12 months, and with lots of new developments happening at the venue the team cannot wait to get started on this year’s PR activity to ensure the hotel stays at the forefront of sustainable hospitality!

Happy Clientversary Mr Lee's!

This month the Sunny Bird PR team is celebrating our one-year clientversary with the no nasties, Dorset-based noodle brand, Mr Lee’s Noodles.

We first began working with Mr Lee’s Noodles back in 2017, a year after they begun trading, with the objective of raising the profile of their gluten-free noodles across the UK.

Over the past year, the Sunny Bird PR team have worked alongside Mr Lee’s on a predominantly media relations campaign, reaching out to the press to gain coverage in food slots, news stories and round-ups.

Throughout the course of the year we’ve smashed our targets, achieving 28 pieces of coverage since January, that’s an average of two features a month! Thanks to our campaign, Mr Lee’s Noodles has featured in prestigious titles such as The Grocer, Vegan Living, Veggie, Woman magazine and The Metro, with pots of their tasty noodles landing on the hands and desks of some of the most well-respected journalists in the country.

To secure these opportunities we’ve taken a number of different approaches to cut through the noise and get make journalists aware of the brand.

One key element of this has been making sure that journalists are aware of the noodles for key calendar hooks such as Veganuary, World Vegan Month and Coeliac Awareness Day.  

We’ve been busy showing off the nutritional value of Mr Lee’s in comparison to other well-known noodle brands (we won’t name names!), offering Mr Lee’s as an alternative option for an ‘al-desko’ lunch and highlighting Mr Lee’s as a leader in the Free-From Foods market. All to great success!

But Mr Lee’s isn’t just about the fantastic noodles. We recognised that Damien Lee, founder and creator of the brand has an extremely compelling story himself; he created the recipes following being diagnosed with cancer and self-prescribing himself a no nasties, raw diet. With a story like this, we knew that there would be an appetite in the press for Damien himself. We created an engaging profile and pitched it to press, resulting in coverage in respected trade and business publications such as Management Today, Entrepreneur and Investor and Start Ups.

Thanks to a 12-month PR strategy, drip feeding Mr Lee’s to journalists throughout the year, a touch of creativity and, of course, a fantastic product, we’ve achieved consistently brilliant results and fantastic coverage for our favourite noodle brand every month. This year, our PR campaign has reached over two million people and achieved a total of 28 pieces of coverage and thanks to our campaign, Mr Lee’s Noodles has featured in prestigious titles such as The Grocer, Vegan Living, Veggie, Woman magazine and The Metro, with pots of their tasty noodles landing on the hands and desks of some of the most well-respected journalists in the country. We cannot wait to continue this brilliant partnership into 2019 and beyond!

Happy Clientversary: Ramsay Health Care UK

This month the Sunny Bird PR team is celebrating our three-year clientversary, and most successful year to date, with private healthcare provider Ramsay Health Care UK.

The healthcare provider first began working with SBPR back in 2015 with the primary objective of positioning Ramsay as a trusted voice of authority in the field while securing backlinks directing readers to the website; increasing Ramsay’s SEO and ultimately boosting sales and patient numbers.

The SBPR team have used creative campaigns to ensure we smash our KPIs year-on-year and achieve national coverage on a monthly basis. This year we have seen a 90% increase in our coverage from the year previous including exclusive features in the likes of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph as well as interviews on Sky News Radio.

To achieve maximum coverage every year, SBPR devise a detailed 12-month strategy which includes a mixture of long-form features, surveys and expert advice to ensure we have something to talk to journalists about over the coming 12 months.

We kicked off this year by tapping into the media’s ‘New Year, New Me’ ethos to promote Ramsay’s weight-loss procedures on a national level. With the media saturated in weight-loss stories, we knew we needed some hard-hitting statistics and relatable case studies to be heard above the noise.

To do this, we surveyed 2000 women who had experienced difficulties with weight loss and discovered that 75% of them were ashamed or embarrassed by their weight gain. The shocking figure was just the hook we needed to take the story to the media. We pitched the feature to national radio stations along with a leading weight loss surgeon from Ramsay, and a case study who had undergone weight loss surgery with Ramsay. Both were available for radio interviews and happy to comment on procedures, statistics in the survey, as well as their own personal experiences to produce some informative and relatable pieces for radio.

Dr Halstead and case study Plaxy on the air

The campaign was a phenomenal success with a total of 14 radio interviews including Sky News Radio, talkRadio and regional stations in key hospital areas. Overall, we reached almost 4 million listeners spreading news of Ramsay weight loss procedures across the country.

Our second targeted media outreach of the year was Bowel Cancer Awareness Month in April. For this, the team utilised assets made in previous years including an eye-catching graphic, which ran with the headline ‘What Does your Stool Say About You?’, highlighted the often-overlooked symptoms of Bowel Cancer.

Our bowel cancer awareness campaign reached over 2.8 million people with 12 pieces of coverage including The Daily Telegraph, Express Online and Yahoo!

This summer, SBPR took on a new challenge away from the national limelight in the form of Ramsay’s regional PR. We were asked to support with the launch of its nationwide Speaking Up for Safety Initiative. Ramsay are the first hospital group in the UK to launch the initiative which encourages and empowers staff to challenge anyone, including senior colleagues, who may be putting patients at risk with their behaviour.

SBPR had just one week to secure as much coverage as possible across the country in advance of the initiative going live in each of Ramsay’s 38 hospitals. Over the course of just one week, the team created targeted media lists of the publications in each of the hospital’s regions, and through intensive calls to regional journalists the team achieved 22 pieces of coverage from Yorkshire to Wiltshire.

Our final campaign of the year focused on sports injuries and the importance of warming up to avoid serious injury - a campaign designed to feature in women’s magazines and more specialist sporting titles.

To deliver this campaign we gathered several assets including shocking survey statistics. The carefully-conducted survey asked 2000 people how they injured themselves while playing sport, as well as their recovery time, age and gender. The survey produced newsworthy results such as 70% of people over 55 have been to A&E with sports related injuries and that sports injuries account for more than 13.5 working days lost per person.

These results were presented to journalists along with heartfelt case studies from women who experienced serious sports injuries impacting their lives who then went on to receive corrective surgery from Ramsay allowing them to return to their sport. Simple warm-up exercises with instructions and corresponding photography were also provided along with expert comment from a Ramsay consultant on the importance of warming up.

This gave the team an array of material and assets to pitch to journalists depending on which were most suitable for their audience and publication. Consequently, we achieved numerous feature length pieces, and backlinks, in key titles such as Top Santé, Runner’s Radar, My Weekly, Trail Running and many more.

Thanks to the team’s carefully planned PR Strategy and great media contacts within the national health press, we managed to secure a huge 64 pieces of coverage for Ramsay Health Care UK over the past twelve months. That coverage has reached over 23 MILLION people, and if the equivalent space was bought in advertising would have cost over £640,000!

Happy Clientversary: The Green House Hotel

The Sunny Bird PR team are celebrating their one-year clientversary with the Green House Hotel in Bournemouth.

The luxury, eco-boutique hotel came to us just over a year ago asking for PR support, not only promote the hotel within key national consumer, trade and regional media but also to promote the hotel within the much-coveted wedding media titles.

With these two goals in mind the team created a comprehensive 12-month timing strategy designed to achieve the Green House Hotel’s PR objectives.

Using a mixture of campaigns and features supporting and championing the hotel’s eco ethos, the SBPR team secured coverage in key titles such as Vogue, Women’s Health Magazine, Foodism Magazine, Escapsim Magazine, Prima Magazine, Hotel F&B magazine and many more. Campaigns created by the SBPR team included features such as ‘Eco Getaways’, ‘The Last Straw’, ‘Sustainable Travel’ and ‘Sustainable Restaurants’.

The SBPR team complimented the eco-features with a series of press trips to the hotel resulting in reviews of the hotel in key targets including Country Living Magazine, Coast Magazine, Luxuria Lifestyle, House Beautiful and Jewish News.

Accompanying the eco-features and reviews, the SBPR team achieved further coverage for awards won, a Q&A with the head chef, recipes and hotel and travel round ups.

Aside from ‘traditional’ PR, the SBPR team also supported the Green House Hotel with their eco-garden makeover. The PR campaign started with the SBPR team interviewing the garden designer and achieving coverage on the project as it was in progress and generating excitement around Bournemouth’s first eco-hotel garden. As the project neared completion, the SBPR team organised attendance for the big reveal event focussing on local media, influencers and businesses. The event was a huge success achieving regional coverage reaching over 145,000 people.

To achieve the hotel’s second goal of achieving coverage in the wedding media, the team needed to come up with a creative campaign to cut through the noise in a very crowded market. With that in mind, the SBPR team assessed the unique offerings of a wedding at The Green House and it was their green credentials that set them apart when it came to wedding venues.

SBPR worked with a Bournemouth-based organisation called Count On Me who count carbon with the aim of reducing companies’ carbon footprint. Using their formulas and spreadsheets the team could then accurately work out the carbon footprint of a wedding at The Green House Hotel.

To make our campaign topical, the team also calculated the carbon footprint of the Kate & Wills’ wedding and to give the campaign a human interest angle, we used three real-life case studies; one couple who had a luxurious wedding in Ibiza, another couple who had a more modest wedding in Dorset and our third couple who got married at The Green House Hotel. The carbon footprint was worked out for each of the case studies which gave a fair mix of comparisons for The Green House to be held up against. As our final asset we researched the most popular wedding destinations and calculated like for like carbon comparisons for each.

To pitch this story out we researched each wedding title as well as journalists in mainstream publications that had featured weddings and contacted them with an individually tailored pitch suited to each of their titles or style of writing.

Our hard work paid off and we achieved an incredible 27 pieces of coverage in wedding titles reaching over 300,000 people of The Green House Hotel’s target audience.

Thanks to a carefully thought out PR strategy, thorough campaign research, meticulous attention to detail and of course a beautiful hotel, the SBPR team helped the Green House Hotel spread its messages far and wide. A total of 109 pieces of coverage were achieved by the SBPR team over the 12 months reaching over 4 million people!

The whole SBPR team have thoroughly enjoyed working with the team at the hotel and are very much looking forward to the next 12 months – we already have several exciting campaigns up our sleeves so watch this space!