Better Connect is a non-profit organisation which aims to create a Yorkshire where every person is empowered to thrive in their life and work. Better Connect partners with organisations across all sectors, with a particular focus and specialism of supporting and strengthening organisations from the voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors.

Since June 2004, Better Connect have made over 200,000 grants, and awarded over £9 billion, to projects that have benefited millions of people.
For the last 5 years, the organisation has been running a programme called ‘Action Towards Inclusion’. The ATI project has received £13.2m of funding from the National Lottery Community Fund and the European Social Fund as part of the 2014-2020 European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme in England.

ATI Participants are paired with a mentor, from one of Better Connect’s 30 partnering organisations, selected based on the person’s unique needs, personal background, interests, and location, to personally guide them through the programme.

Enter The Marketing Optimist, and our expertise in digital PR for events, to tell the wider Yorkshire community about their achievements.

Using Digital PR for Events to Celebrate the Impact of ATI

ATI has made a huge difference to the lives of many people in York, North Yorkshire and the East Riding region, and the team at Better Connect wanted to celebrate the amazing achievements of the programme, and increase awareness of ATI.

To achieve this, we combined our expertise in digital PR for events, and in video creation, to create press releases, and a professional video covering their celebration event (held on October 11th at the Majestic Hotel in Harrogate), to raise awareness of ATI and its impact.

​Video and Digital PR for Events

We met with the team, to talk through how they were going to be celebrating ATI’s achievements, and began to form a plan for how the event would be best represented in this medium.

We worked closely with trusted suppliers on this project – video specialists, and professionals in the world of film and TV, with experience in providing video to support digital PR for events – who could bring the event to life, capture the emotion behind ATI’s mission, and the warmth in the room on the day.

The end product thrilled Better Connect, delivered on capturing the sense of pride and accomplishment the event honoured, and gave attendees (and ATI participants) a way to remember the day, and a permanent means to reflect on their achievements.

The video also serves as evergreen content for Better Connect, to market ATI’s impact, in a tangible, real – and importantly – human way, and can be used in future event marketing campaigns and in digital PR for events Better Connect hosts in the future.

Raising Awareness with Digital PR for Events

The programme had a huge impact. However, the team felt that little was known about ATI, outside the circles of those who had engaged directly with the programme, and wanted us to amplify its impact.

We began putting together a digital PR for events strategy, designed to generate PR coverage in news outlets based in North Yorkshire, and in titles related to the work they had done.

Our copywriters crafted both a pre-event press release, to drive awareness of the event, and of ATI within its community, and a post-event press release, to further drive awareness, and support Better Connect in their future work and funding endeavours, by spreading word of their impact.

We proposed the post-event press release be delivered differently. Rather than contacting journalists by typical means (posting the press release into the body of the email), as we did with our pre-event press release, we designed a custom email (think email newsletters), embedding the video we created, to bring the content to life for journalists.

By using the designed email delivery medium, we could take advantage of the mechanism’s benefit of forming a Press Pack, with links to the Images, videos, profiles of Better Connect personnel etc.

The pieces themselves made a splash in regional press, achieving placements in 13 publications, viewed by approximately 3 million readers. The risk we took on the delivery of the post-email press release paid off, proving that there are no rules when it comes to digital PR for events, and that strong strategic thinking is key to success.