Hill+Knowlton Strategies

This week, rather than sharing a variety of work, I am just focusing on one as I think it is for such a fantastic cause:

This weekend Norwich City FC will proudly wear the logo of charity Railway Children on their shirts for their Premier League clash with Everton at Carrow Road. The Canaries will be lending their support for club sponsor Aviva’s UK charity partner, to raise awareness of the fact that one child runs away from home every five minutes in the UK.

Along with fans, NCFC Director Stephen Fry will show his support via Twitter to help raise much-needed funds for the charity. For every tweet or re-tweet posted on Twitter on match day including the hashtag #1every5, Aviva will donate £1 to Railway Children.

H+K worked on this project from the ideas stage right through to executing the activity in conjunction with Railway Children, Norwich City and our client, Aviva. This involved planning activity with the media and, crucially, over social media with a particular focus on Twitter. In order to help promote the activity the team visited the Norwich City training ground on this week (Thursday) to oversee an interview session with the club’s manager Chris Houghton and a photo shoot with him, star striker Grant Holt and representatives of the Railway Children charity.

We will all be on Twitter this weekend to do our bit to help raise as much money for the Railway Children as possible, we hope you will be too.

Also our Pampers team worked out that parents lose up to 4 hours of sleep every night due to their baby waking up but despite this sleep deprivation the mornings are a parents most favourite time to spend with their little ones.   I must say cuddles with my boys are the best way to wake up!

Also just to note, this coming Monday Tim Luckett our Crisis and Issues head honcho will present part of a social media seminar to the Arts Law Forum in London. The Arts Law Forum is part of the alumni of the law firm Squire Sanders,  who also run the event. Guests will include representatives from the National Theatre, Tate, British Museum, Royal Opera House, English National Opera and Comic Relief.

Three main topics will be covered during the day, of which Tim will present the third:

• “Inside and outside the workplace” – how to fairly deal with employees who abuse Social Media and IT (Ramez Moussa)
• “Internet defamation” – the remedies available to commercial organisations (Simon Garbett)
• “How to crisis manage: A case study” –  Global PR and communications agency, Hill & Knowlton Strategies (part of WPP Group), will share some practical advice on how to protect your brand, manage communications and respond to incidents and negative criticism in a systematic and planned manner.

Tim will present two case studies of companies who ‘got it wrong’ and before going on to outline the lessons learned and top tips for protecting brands and mitigating reputational risk.

Have a great weekend all, wrap up warm!

Not sure what is in the October air but my goodness it has been busy at H+K Towers this week

Monday saw the external launch of our Aviva S2S Mumsnet campaign which is  centred on encouraging parents to talk to their children about running away from home in order to  raise awareness of the issue, and of the Railway children charity.  As its such an important and topical issue, our launch story has gained lots of media interest including Yahoo.com, Female.First.co.uk and Radio 5 Live and is naturally all over the twittersphere

Mumsnet.com Running Away home page

Also on Monday, we launched Family Investment’s Hotspots report which has received widespread national media coverage including seven of the national newspapers reporting the story. If you have somehow managed to miss it, Wokingham is the best place to live to bring up a family.

Hotspots Report Infographic

Our healthcare team has been working hard at the European Society of Medical Oncology’s (ESMO) annual meeting (a huge event in the world of cancer research) which took place in Vienna last weekend. During ESMO the team supported a media roundtable where two leading experts in the field of bone metastases, a severely painful type of bone cancer often associated with advanced stages, were well received by the audience including 14 top-tier European journalists from Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.  Don’t just take our word for it, check out this infographic about the hot topics from the meeting

The Healthcare team also recently won some inspiring new business with The Harley Street Clinic in London. Earlier this week, members of the team had the opportunity to visit the clinic’s recently refurbished Paediatric Intensive Care Unit to see firsthand the importance of the unit in providing complex care to very ill children. The team is excited to be working with H+K offices in Kuwait on this project. See more of the great work done by the clinic here

Our Food + Drink team have also had a rewarding week, after over seven months of campaigning for public votes, yesterday the Transform Your Patch team took Fazer from N-Dubz to Dartford Skate Park to celebrate his triumph in Transform Your Patch – a regeneration campaign from Britivic and PepsiCo that has transformed around 165 outdoor spaces across the UK.  Since March, Fazer has been competing against three other celebrity faces, to win an additional £100,000 for an outdoor space he is passionate about, skate parks. Yesterday saw him emerge triumphant against Densie Van Outen campaigning for playgrounds, Robbie Savage squaring up for five-a-side football pitches and Emma Willis championing picnic areas and parks. The £100,000 will now go towards making sure communities get the most out of the transformed skate parks across the UK. Read more about the campaign here.

Our Energy + Industrials team have also been mega busy, not only did they launch Enphase Energy into the UK at Solar Power UK – we set up and staffed media interviews with the key trades to support the launch. Fantastic response so far!

… But they also provided media support for the launch of Sheringham Shoal wind farm off the coast of Norfolk – resulting in a lovely exclusive with Channel 4 News, take a look at the video

And as if that wasn’t enough, we also helped Pampers® and UNICEF launch their “1 pack = 1 vaccine” initiative for the seventh year running, celebrating that together they have helped eliminate Maternal & Newborn Tetanus (MNT) in eight of the world’s poorest countries.

Roll on the weekend!  Hope you all have a good one!

I love that in my job I get to see so much of the great work that goes on across the Agency.  One of my highlights of this week is some work we have done with Aviva and Railway Children.

Aviva wants to create an awareness campaign for their UK charity partner, Railway Children as part of their global Street to School CSR initiative. Railway Children fights for the rights of young people alone and at risk on the streets in the UK – which is a relatively hidden issue within UK society. H&K proposed a route that would lift the lid on the issue, profile Railway Children’s vital work and mobilise young people to engage and spread awareness of a cause that affects their more vulnerable peers.

The Street Dance for Change campaign was born. A few weeks ago we did some work with Diversity and then yesterday Andy McCullough (Railway Children) and Alexandra Burke were interviewed live on the BBC Radio London Drivetime show.

Using all of the different collateral we have provided them with, they ran a 6+minute package, beginning by introducing the issue with presenter Eddie Nestor asking listeners to call in if they had experienced running away from home themselves; reporter Jonathan giving an account of the event at the school today and about Alexandra Burke’s passion for the cause, including some very detailed messaging re the stats and facts presented during the session. This was followed by Alex speaking about her role as Ambassador.

Well done Team!