New Client Win: Urtle

The Sunny Bird PR team are thrilled to announce they have been chosen to work on the launch of Urtle, a revolutionary new booking platform.

The platform will completely change the way the recruitment industry for Health and Social Care works allowing employees freedom of choice, quick payment after shifts, the chance to review employers and an end to reliance on recruitment agencies.

Launching today, Urtle has already been described by experts as ‘just what the industry needs’. The SBPR team are excited to be a part of this journey and will be working on the PR and social media for this, the latest disruptor brand.

www.urtle.co.uk

Journalist of the Month

In honour of our fabulous PR placement student, we’ve decided to do things a little differently this month and showcase a journalist from a student publication. Zlatna Nedev is the Fashion and Lifestyle Editor for Bournemouth University’s Nerve Magazine as well as a presenter for Nerve Radio. When she’s not busy with assignments and deadlines, she loves delving into New Philosopher magazine and dancing to Eminem’s new album. Here Zlatna answers the infamous Sunny Bird PR questions…

1.    What are the 5 words that best describe you?
Ambitious, open-minded, spontaneous, passionate and a little bit crazy.

2.    What magazine do you love reading and why?
I absolutely love magazines. My collection got so big that I had to get rid of half of them because I just didn’t have enough space. I know people prefer the digital alternatives now, but I just like the feel and smell of a brand-new magazine. I like to look around different shops and pick up magazines I’ve never seen before or special editions. If I had to choose a favourite it would be New Philosopher.

3.    What is your favourite book?
I’ve always liked Russian and English classic literature such as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Sadly, I haven’t had much time to read since being at Uni.

4.    Which song makes you dance?
Right now I have Eminem’s new album on repeat.

5.    Tell us about your proudest moment.
For me it’s not about an exact moment, it’s more about the hard work and the decisions I’ve made to get where I am now. I’m proud for being brave enough to move from Bulgaria to England and do what I love.

6.    What’s your dream career?
Two years ago I would have said a magazine editor straight away. Now, I’m more open to not putting myself in one category. I love journalism and writing and talking about our society. In the past couple of years, I’ve fallen in love with radio, presenting live and connecting with the audience. I’m passionate about so many things, so I hope my future career will allow me to be creative and inspire people to question things.

7.    Where are you happiest?
Anywhere with my friends. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by positive, supportive, energetic and ambitious people so this is where I’m happiest.

8.    Who would be your number one dinner guest and why?
These questions are getting more and more difficult, aren’t they? There’s this Bulgarian actress, her name is Stoyanka Mutafova. She’s 96 years old and she’s still on stage working in theatrical plays every day. Her nickname is Ms Natural Disaster and she really is one!

9.    If you could have any superpower, what power would it be and why?
I want to make everyone appreciate each other’s differences.

10.  If you had to ask us one question what would it be?
What journalistic skills cross over into the PR industry?

There’s certainly a lot of the same skills required for both industries. Here’s what the SBPR team thought were most applicable:

·         Lizzie: Writing, interviewing and working to deadlines I think are the strongest transferable skills.

·         Georgie: Knowing what makes a good story.

·         Alex: Developing a thick skin!

·         Laura: Knowing what journalists are looking for when pitching to press.

·         Raluca: Content creation and storytelling.

Client Win: Intelligent Health

Sunny Bird PR is proud to announce that the team has been chosen to work with Intelligent Health on its latest initiative, Beat the Street.

Beat the Street is the innovative programme which turns a town into a game to improve the health of communities around the world. The unique family game rewards players who cycle, run or walk with points and prizes, encouraging families to get out and about and increase their physical activity.  

By engaging with communities through a fun game, Beat the Street can lift activity and build lasting changes to people’s behaviour that will greatly improve their physical and mental health, reduce congestion and boost community cohesion.

Intelligent Health approached Sunny Bird PR for support with both the regional and national PR as the brand introduces Beat the Street to players, stakeholders and the media.

Sunny Bird, owner and founder of Sunny Bird PR, commented: “The whole team is very excited to be working on this innovative campaign from Intelligent Health. We’re passionate about community engagement projects and are proud to be supporting such an inspirational programme.”

Using Google Maps for Business

Google My Business is an application which helps your business appear on Google Maps. It’s not only a great application to find a business, but also improves your searchability. Having a Google Business listing means you can control what people see about you - it’s easy to make changes to your business listing whether that’s updating your working hours, changing your address or phone number.

For this blog, we’ve put together some of the ways in which you can optimise your Google page and the reasons why every business should be signing up for a free listing.

People Will Find You

Signing up for a local business listing on Google is free. Signing up makes it easier for people to find you and therefore brings in new customers. If someone is looking for a particular business or service, and your company pops up, Google will feature basic information that people can then use for quick reference. Google will not only list your business location, but it will also display your business hours, general information and it may even feature user reviews.

Reviews

It’s essential that you get customers to review you on Google as this will increase your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), drive website traffic and improve your Google rankings. Potential customers find reviews really useful and they can encourage people to actually click through to your website.

Improve Your SEO

Creating a Google Maps page will improve your SEO and therefore your Google rankings. As a result, you will gain more website traffic by allowing a click-through to your website. Once a new listing is created, a Google Maps location synchronises with a traditional Google Search for easy access and searchability. Google My Business compliments your existing website by giving your business a public identity and presence with a listing on Google.

Keywords

Use specific keywords related to your business to help SEO. If you’re an IT company you could use keywords such as software, computing or digital which makes it easier to search when people visit Google’s home page. Like your website, your Google listing is just as important when it comes to featuring key words in the description.

Photos

Businesses with photos on their listings receive 42% more requests for driving directions on Google Maps and 35% more click-throughs to their websites than businesses without photos, according to Google. It’s important to refresh the photos on the page and ensure that it fully represents your brand. Although not necessary to change regularly, you must keep them updated.

You can sign up for your own Google My business page by following this link.

Client Win: PatientSource

The team at SBPR are delighted to announce that they have been chosen by innovative health care technology provider, PatientSource, to raise its profile on a national and international level.

Leaders in the field, PatientSource provide revolutionary electronic patient record (EPR) systems to health care organisations around the world. Designed by doctors for doctors, this is the first EPR system built for the user, not the profit margin.

PatientSource were at a pivotal point in their journey and required a carefully timed and thought out PR strategy to capitalise on its latest news and developments, including its deployment on the island of St. Helena.

Sunny commented: “The team have a wealth of experience and knowledge in the health care industry and we all knew that the incredible stories PatientSource had to tell would go far and wide given the right PR platform.

“We’ve all been very excited to start work on PatientSource, it’s one of those brands that’s making a change and we’re very proud to be a part of their journey.”

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!

Client Win: Bournemouth Collegiate School

Sunny Bird PR is proud to announce that the Bournemouth Collegiate School (BCS) has chosen the SBPR team to elevate the school's profile to new levels through a creative partnership.

The Bournemouth based Sunny Bird PR team will raise the school’s profile on a national and regional level through an integrated PR campaign and media relations strategy. SBPR will draw on its expertise to ensure the school’s consistently high achievements are highlighted in the media and its core principles reach the right audiences nationwide.

Simon Coulter, Head of Marketing at BCS, said: “We are delighted to announce this new relationship with Sunny Bird PR. I genuinely believe that they share our passion and creativity for doing things differently and are perfectly poised to help us raise our profile to new audiences.

“I am confident that whilst working in partnership, they will not only challenge us but inspire us in places that would normally exist outside our usual comfort zones, which is exactly what we need.”

In line with the school’s key messaging, Sunny Bird PR has placed young people and their accomplishments at the forefront of its PR strategy designed to gain media attention.

Throughout the partnership, BCS students will have the opportunity to partake in thought-provoking and entertaining activities which will not only aid their co-curricular experience but provide insight into the Public Relations process and sector.

Founder and Managing Director of Sunny Bird PR, Sunny Bird, commented: “We have wanted to work with Bournemouth Collegiate School for a long time and are excited to see what we can achieve by working together.

“The passion from both the staff and the students at the school is inspiring and something we are proud to be part of and eager to talk about to our connections in print and broadcast media.”

PR Campaigns - The Good, The Bad & The Viral

August was an eventful month here at Sunny Bird PR, but we still found the time (between winning new clients and some heatwave beach time) to scour the media for the best and worst PR Campaigns out there.  

This month’s campaigns include health conscious tech launches, a digital treasure hunt, organ donations on Tinder, friends reuniting over pizza, a flying library and a dating app campaign designed to attract more women.

Tech Campaign with a Serious Health Message

The Peruvian League Against Cancer teamed up with tech company Happiness Brussells to deliver one very cool PR campaign. On the Playa Agua Dulce beach, a ‘shadow Wi-Fi’ network was created meaning people could only connect if they were in the shade. The technology was designed to encourage beach-goers to stay safe in the hours when the sun’s UV rays were at their most powerful to both raise awareness of, and help prevent, skin cancer.

The big blue structure installed on the seafront provided free Wi-Fi access for up to 250 people in its shade, possible thanks to a directional antenna. As the Peruvian League Against Cancer explained: “A sensor tracks the movements of the sun throughout the day, changing the rotation of the Wi-Fi antenna. When the sun moves and the shade shifts, so must Wi-Fi seekers.”

The tech company behind the design released access to the software for non-profit use so cancer foundations around the word can set up similar systems without the technical know-how. It’s hoped a series of the networks will soon be launched in San Francisco, New Zealand and Europe.

The campaign gained multiple pieces of national coverage in Peru as well as in the UK, Australia and television coverage in the United States.

Overall the charity’s campaign cleverly harnessed the power technology has over young sun-worshippers to make people think about a serious subject.

“V Marks the Spot”

When researching app and tech launches we looked back at Richard Branson’s fun, treasure-hunt style campaign called ‘V marks the spot’ implemented to launch the new Virgin Red loyalty app.

The epic nationwide treasure hunt was inspired by Sir Richard’s favourite childhood reading book, Masquerade.

The aim of the game was to hunt down some of the one million golden coins (with Branson’s face on them) that were hidden around the web, in the Virgin Red app and across the Virgin Empire. When people found the coins, they were able to unlock awesome prizes.

Nine people also won Upper Class flights to Richard Branson’s estate on Moskito Island and participated in a real treasure hunt!

Virgin worked with numerous agencies to launch the project, which was in development for two years including creative agency Mr President and Speed Communications.

The treasure hunt was open to everyone, but Virgin customers gained extra clues and points through the app, giving them a higher chance of winning. The priority following the launch, was to continue to reward loyal customers across the brand with special offers and competitions similar to the treasure hunt.

The campaign was a fun way to get people to download the app, and reward continuing users.

 Although a creative campaign, it didn’t achieve a substantial amount of coverage, but it did get a mention in the Drum, Campaign Live, Creative Brief, PR Week, and Marketing Week.

Tinder’s Organ Donation

Back in 2015, Tinder partnered with NHS to raise awareness of organ donation. The app is widely known for being used by people to find a good personality match, but for two weeks it became a way to encourage users to become organ donors. People who ‘swiped’ on pictures of celebrities (Jamie Laing, Gemma Oaten etc.)  would be encouraged to sign up to the NHS organ register almost immediately and received an instant message saying: "If only it was that easy for those in need of a life-saving organ to find a match.”

The reason the NHS teamed up with Tinder was because of the younger users; an age group which is in desperate need of organ donors. For an entire decade before this campaign, more than 6,000 people had died waiting for an organ donor.

The campaign successfully raised awareness and is still being talked about to this day, with coverage on BBC News, ITV News, The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Independent.

Christmas in July

PR’s across the country have been getting into the festive spirit (despite the soaring temperatures) as the monthly publications started writing their Christmas issues in July/August. So, although it was the height of summer, we’ve had our Christmas hats on in SBPR HQ and been researching Christmas PR campaigns.

One of our favourites was this heart-warming campaign from Pizza Express; the popular pizza restaurant chain decided to pull on people’s heartstrings by tracking down friends who hadn’t seen each other since childhood and reuniting them.

We all love a good stat and Pizza Express got some good ones for this campaign, their survey found that only five per cent of Brits are still close to childhood friends with 26% of those surveyed not having seen integral people in their lives for more than 10 years. Using these stats as their springboard, the restaurant group launched the ‘Gather Around Great Food’ campaign in a bid to reunite friends across the country.

Taking four weeks to pull together, eight unsuspecting people headed to Pizza Express believing they were competition winners of a pizza-making experience. There they were met with actors posing as waiters and cameras hidden in Christmas decorations, ensuring each reunion between four different couples were captured on film.

One such example was Danni and Becky, both 33, best friends who last saw each other when they were 16 years old, when they spent the night sitting on the side of the road eating pizza. Their lives have gone in different directions but, after a while, they became aware that they’d been to school together, making for a very teary reunion.

Pizza Express senior marketing manager Timothy Love explains: “Everybody nowadays is connected to thousands of people on social media, but it is a different story in real life.

"With ‘Gather Around Great Food’ we wanted to encourage people to reconnect with their long-lost friends and what a better way than over pizza! Christmas is all about coming together and our aim is to help everyone along the way.”

This was a true heart-warming winner as far as Christmas campaigns go, not only did the brand position themselves as a caring, sharing company but it also achieved national coverage and the video on Facebook saw a 22% increase in followers in just one month. https://www.facebook.com/pizzaexpress/videos/10155988346698139/

Easyjet ‘Flybraries’

With July marking the start of the summer holidays, airline easyJet launched a European-wide initiative to get children reading. Carrying out a survey into the British public, easyJet found that almost four in ten parents said that their child has fewer than 10 books at home. In response to this, the budget airline opened 296 ‘Flybraries’ across its aircrafts, stocked with 17,500 children’s books translated into seven languages placed in seat pockets.

An initiative that gets kids doing something wholesome and away from their computer screens is always a great way to get into press. Plus, underpinning their campaign with shocking research, and hosting a launch with our fave Radio One DJ, Greg James, was a sure-fire recipe for success and achieved coverage in The Express, ITV News, The Telegraph, Huffington Post and many more.

‘Miniature Males’

We looked at Match.com’s Model Males campaign which transformed some of its eligible bachelors on the dating site into real life miniature dolls to show the range of people using the service.  With the help of 3D printing, the company immortalised in plastic, seven men, each encapsulating a unique type of romance available of female suitors on the site. The company was perhaps hinting that its ‘Male Models’ are of a higher quality than some of the rival services, with allusions to good manners and ghosting in its announcement.

Figurines were featured in individual boxes and had their online dating profile attached to them so that visitors could find out more about their potential dates. They were available for a limited time in a pop-up shop in Marylebone, London. 

‘Model Males’ PR stunt had 3 targets they wanted to achieve: show that their platform is better than the rival dating sites from a quality point of view, prove that men registered with Match.com “don’t believe in ghosting but do believe in making a date special” and to balance genders on the app by attracting more women.

Now, we can’t say if those targets were hit, but although the campaign was slightly confusing, and the message wasn’t clear, it did attract lots of coverage, 41 pieces in total, including The Drum, 3D Printing Industry, Engadget, The Times, Telegraph, BBC News and an interview of participants on BBC Radio 5 Live.