Royal British Legion & Fields in Trust: Centenary Fields

The Royal British Legion provides lifelong support for the Armed Forces community – serving men and women, veterans, and their families. Fields in Trust champions green spaces for people to enjoy in perpetuity.

The Project

Their shared goal was to promote their message of Live On and to say ‘Thank You’ to the First World War generation who helped shape our world today. The campaign aimed to promote green spaces in regional areas, urging local councils to protect more green sites.

Centenary Fields aims to protect parks, playing fields and other recreational spaces, in memory of the millions of people who lost their lives in World War I.

What We Did

We helped the two institutions to collaborate and create a press release that had all the key messages embedded in it; we then redrafted this into a broadcast cue, that snappily summed up the story. We also helped collate a list of all regional sites, highlighting where in each region a site was either protected or proposed to be protected.

The radio day was broadcast from our London studio where we had Fields in Trust spokesperson, Angela Lewis, and Royal British Legion spokesperson, Bob Gamble OBE. We were able to include both spokespeople in every interview so all messaging could be conveyed, keeping each stakeholder happy.

Challenges

The main challenge with this campaign was that it fell at a heavily competitive news time. Not only were we competing against other WWI Centenary stories, but the week also featured Prince Harry’s Royal Wedding, the start of the Grenfell Tower enquiry and the one year anniversary of the Manchester Arena attack.

Outcome

The campaign was a real success and we easily exceeded our KPIs with a range of regional coverage across the UK. We were able to secure interviews for regional spokespeople in Wales, on BBC Radio Wales and Cymru, as well as spokespeople in Scotland on BBC Radio Scotland and Northern Ireland on BBC Radio Ulster.

We also managed to get coverage in London for Angela on London Live TV.

In total we secured 25 Radio interviews through a combination of spokespeople: 12 of these were with BBC Regional Radio stations, the other 13 were with large commercial stations.

“The team at Shout! Communications were enthusiastic about our programme from the outset. Their attention to detail ensured we were able to share our message with a very large number of local radio stations. Doing it all in one day from a London studio was a cost-effective way of telling our story – with very professional support from Shout!” Angela Lewis, Head of Programmes Fields in Trust

More Case Studies

23. Aug 2022

Parents discovering a passion for science, youngsters sending messages to space. Then astronaut Sir Tim Peake came on board.

4. Aug 2022

A self-published book about graffiti knitting. It doesn’t sound the most likely broadcast PR story. But look what happened!

4. Aug 2022

With hybrid working having become the “new norm”, some of us have skewed the boundaries between home and professional life. Mailbird’s campaign reminding workers about email etiquette therefore was timely.