Ahead of the launch of its new Professional Policing course, ULaw wanted a multi-channel PR campaign that would build awareness of both the brand and the career opportunities available in the police force. The campaign also needed to position ULaw as a leading voice on the topic of the Policing Vision 2025, an initiative that aims to provide all police officers with a degree education.
The campaign needed to go beyond traditional press coverage, to also deliver engaging content for the website and social media, as well as creating a talking point for broadcast press. This approach meant we needed to collaborate closely with ULaw’s internal teams, our Studio, and a broadcast partner, to coordinate and deliver a cross-channel campaign with maximum impact.
The outcome included several broadcast features with a key ULaw spokesperson, national and trade press coverage, and a huge spike in visits to the Professional Policing pages on ULaw’s website.
Campaign objectives
Build awarness of ULaw and its Professional Policing course through targeted press coverage
Increase engagement with the Professional Policing course pages on site
Solution
We began by carrying out a piece of research to gauge public attitudes and awareness towards a career in the police force and the Policing Vision 2025.
Combining our research findings with expertise from the ULaw faculty, we crafted a story for press highlighting the lack of desire to pursue a career in the force among young people. We tied this in closely with ongoing stories in the news agenda around the government pledge to recruit 20,000 new officers, as well as public concerns around low policing numbers, and used this to inform our promotion strategy.
We had identified radio as a key channel for ULaw, so we worked with leading broadcast agency, Markettiers, to secure multiple radio interviews with ULaw tutor, Salome Verrell. We developed a clear and comprehensive brief, to ensure every interview included key messaging and a clear call to action to direct web traffic towards the policing pages.
Our Studio created an animation to be used across all of ULaw’s digital channels, to ensure we could continue to engage audiences once they reached the website.
We worked to ensure activity was carefully coordinated to go live at the right time, tying in with the news agenda for maximum impact. This approach allowed us to achieve multiple mentions of the campaign in the week of launch, including a feature in The Daily Express and an interview on talkRADIO’s breakfast show.
Results
- 168% MoM uplift in relevant page views
- 18 brand mentions including The Daily Express
- 13 radio interviews including a weekend breakfast slot