Working with Greater Manchester Youth Network on their campaign
Our client Greater Manchester Youth Network (GMYN) has had an exciting few months. They have been partnering with JCDecaux to launch a city-wide campaign in a first for the charity.
This campaign has been over a year in the making. All of the High-Rise team are very proud to have worked on this project and achieved such success.
We have worked with GMYN for over a year. This project has been a significant part of the PR and communications support we have been providing to the charity.
Working with the young people
GMYN partnered with JCDecaux to take part in their Community Channel initiative. This allows charities to have advertising space they never would have had the opportunity to access otherwise.
GMYN’s campaign is urging Greater Manchester businesses to support the region’s young people through more business support. After six weeks of their campaign being live on the billboards, they hosted an event inviting businesses to attend and learn more about the charity.
This campaign from start to finish has been led by young people that are beneficiaries of the charity. Throughout the making of the campaign, the young people discussed why they are proud to be part of the charity and what they wanted to see from the campaign. From this, we were able to plan our media and communications support. Our main focus was on what the young people wanted to achieve from the campaign.
The young people have been involved in all aspects of the campaign and are very proud of how it turned out. From the start with what the creative would look like, to the launch of this seeing everyone’s visions come to life the young people have been front and centre.
The campaign was shown across 90 billboards in Manchester city centre. The young people saw themselves on the screens the first morning it went live. It was great to gather with the young people that worked so hard on the campaign to see all their hard work pay off.
Success of the business event
The purpose of the campaign was to attract new business support. Particularly from those who are interested in learning more about the charity and how they could potentially support them.
The breakfast business event took place at the start of November. It was a great success as 60 new businesses and individuals came along after seeing many of the billboards around the city centre.
From the event alone the charity has already recorded 30 direct pledges of support including two donation promises.
Throughout the campaign being shown across the city, we also promoted the event through our PR and media work, with an audience of 2.01 million people viewing the coverage we secured.
The importance of charity PR
Alex Fairweather, CEO and Founder of GMYN, says: “We really appreciated this opportunity from JCDecaux and would love to do it again. To allow a charity to have such a visible digital presence for several weeks is very rare and something we couldn’t do without your help. This has been a unique and very rewarding experience for GMYN.
“The project also promoted GMYN’s brand as well as the need for more business support. It has been great getting our name and impact known more widely. It was the first time we had been seen so prominently across the city and many of our supporters and partners commented on how good it looked.
“The campaign will continue as we will now be following up on the engagements from the event. We will be running our employability campaign until next July with a pledge to support 200 young people.”
For most charities opportunities to have their name and services promoted so widely never happens. We are glad to see GMYN having such a positive experience and outcome through this campaign.
We look forward to working with GMYN on their further projects, as we have enjoyed all aspects of this business engagement campaign. To find out more about the campaigning work we have done, please see here.