charities & education experience

BOTTLE PR: part of your community

Your organisation makes a difference. Why not tell people about it?

We provide award-winning PR for many education and not-for-profit clients.

We have specialist experience of issues-based PR: our consultants have worked with organisations such as YWCA, War Child and Centrepoint. Plus we handle major projects with a community and education focus for public sector agencies and commercial clients.

Our consultants’ voluntary sector experience

Before becoming a consultant, Carole Scott, a BOTTLE PR director, worked inhouse within the voluntary sector. She communicated on a wide range of complex issues from schizophrenia, through youth homelessness to teenage pregnancy. She has worked extensively and sensitively with ‘case studies’, helping them prepare for media interviews. At YWCA Carole set up the press office from scratch. Here she was the in house lead for the media launch of RESPECT, a campaign to dispel some of the myths surrounding teenage pregnancy and motherhood.

This experience means she is sensitive to the needs and pressures of inhouse PR teams within the third sector.

Verity Blake, Senior PR Consultant, has experience of bringing the private sector together with the education and charitable sectors. As PR Manager for Symantec, Verity managed an Internet Safety In Schools campaign. The campaign involved working with 60 schools, local community representatives and a charity partner Childnet International. The campaign achieved a 25% increase in traffic to the internet safety section of the Norton Internet Security website. Verity also set up an Employee Ambassadors’ programme to get staff involved in educating the local community on Internet safety.

Verity’s experience means she is adept at bringing together voluntary and private sector partners to achieve PR that benefits both.

Consultant Kirsty Shaw joined BOTTLE PR from BBC Radio Oxford, where she spent her first few years as an Assistant Producer on a high profile radio programme. She then moved within BBC Radio Oxford to work on the community action desk (working directly with Community Service Volunteers), helping to bring charities to the forefront of BBC activity.

Kirsty’s experience has given her an excellent grounding in working with a wide variety of voluntary sector organisations.

This range of voluntary sector experience helps BOTTLE PR clients communicate on complex topics, to increase awareness of what they do - and help secure continued support for their work.

BOTTLE PR has extensive experience in education. We are currently working with South East LSC (Learning and Skills Council) and with the Surrey County Council Adult and Community Learning Services. In addition, we have been retained by the Independent Association of Prep Schools (IAPS) for the last two years.

BOTTLE was contracted by the LSC to help drive participation in learning programmes among both young people and adults.

BOTTLE PR devised a strategic campaign using National Apprenticeships Week and human interest stories to illustrate how the LSC makes a real difference to people’s lives.

With a ‘challenge an Apprentice’ event and apprentices taking part in interviews, we secured extensive print and broadcast coverage. The success of the campaign secured us an ongoing contract and we have just completed work on the 2009 Apprenticeships Week. We ran eight apprenticeship challenges, and a road show with former ‘Apprentice’ Tim Campbell. Coverage was so extensive that LSC in the South East has recorded highest number of enquiries from employers in the UK.

Other work with LSC in the past year includes managing the media relations for the Train to Gain, Skills Pledge and Colleges Week programmes and helping secure media interest in their business breakfasts.

One of our Senior PR Consultants, Amanda Politzer has also previously worked for the LSC to promote their Skills MOT sessions across the East of England. Her work involved securing radio interviews and regional print coverage across the region.

Elsewhere in education, we work with the Independent Association of Prep Schools, the professional association for Heads and Deputy Heads of the 600 leading preparatory schools in the UK and Worldwide. BOTTLE PR’s focus is to promote the value of its membership and to target so called ‘first time buyers’ – that is, parents who did not attend private school themselves but may now consider this option for their own children.

Among the initiatives we have created for IAPS is a partnership with the Guardian Learn programme. We have achieved a wide range of coverage across national, educational and broadcast media. Our media relations work for the 2008 IAPS conference resulted in the most extensive media coverage they have achieved for ‘many years’.

What can we do for you?

Deliver successful strategic media relations
Organise publicity-grabbing events
Launch a corporate sponsorship appeal
Redesign communications with stakeholders
Make your PR budget work harder

As we have done for clients such as:

Warwickshire & Northamptonshire Air Ambulance
Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland Air Ambulance
The Independent Association of Prep Schools (IAPS)
Learning and Skills Council
Surrey County Council Adult and Community Learning Services
St Edward’s School, Oxford
Oxford Brookes University Business School

“BOTTLE PR is a member of our life-saving team. They’ve made a substantial contribution to saving lives across the Midlands by promoting our work. Barely a week goes by without excellent media coverage."
Andy Williamson
CEO, Warwickshire & Northamptonshire Air Ambulance

CASE STUDY: WARWICKSHIRE AND NORTHAMPTONSHIRE AIR AMBULANCE (WNAA) AND DERBYSHIRE, LEICESTERSHIRE AND RUTLAND AIR AMBULANCE

WNAA provides an emergency medical service for over 2000 square miles and saves countless lives, although it receives no Government or National Lottery funding. It needs to raise approximately £1.5 million per year just to cover its running costs. BOTTLE PR was appointed to reposition the organisation as a highly professional and progressive one that blue chip companies would take seriously from a fundraising perspective, and to give it a far greater media profile both regionally and nationally.

Our strategy was to develop defined sponsorship packages, and to attack our target media on two fronts. The first was to touch their hearts by showing WNAA in action in real-life emergencies, and the second was through the endorsement of a high profile and aspirational celebrity. We devised a campaign called ‘Cloud 999’ and launched this in May 2006 with a special event at WNAA’s base. We were able to contract Brazilian legend Pelé to front the campaign launch during a brief visit to the UK, and the charity’s Director and crew members were on hand to be interviewed about the service. The media launch was attended by two television crews and over 20 journalists.

Following the launch we have concentrated on repeated and consistent media coverage to illustrate the human aspect of WNAA’s service, leveraging the crew’s close-up view of incidents and ‘eye witness’ accounts from patients to push details to the media. We have also pushed details of fundraising events and activities to the media wherever possible

Coverage has been achieved in, among many others, Sky News, BBC Midlands Today, ITV Central News, The Guardian, BBC online, Birmingham Post, Coventry Evening Telegraph, Mercia FM, Heart FM and Capital Gold.

BOTTLE PR continues to be the retained agency for WNAA. In October 2007 the charity was asked to step in a take over the air ambulance service for Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland Air Ambulance, as the previous charity was pulling out due to lack of funding.

BOTTLE PR worked closely with the charity’s director, Andy Williamson, to organise the launch of the new service to secure widespread regional media coverage. The aim was twofold: to raise awareness of the new charity in Derbyshire and Leicestershire and to support fundraising. The success of the launch coverage and a constant drip feed of case studies, mission stories and fundraising news over the first year has helped ensure that this new charity is already hitting its fundraising targets, rather than operating a first year deficit as had been forecast.

CASE STUDY: SURREY COUNTY COUNCIL

BOTTLE PR is currently working with Surrey County Council on a programme to devise a new brand identity for its Adult and Community Learning (ACL) services, and to implement a marketing and PR strategy to increase the number of students enrolling for courses with ACL. The ACL must attract 14,000 learners to its courses as part of its funding agreement with the LSC, despite the fact that the take-up of leisure learning is declining nationwide.

The programme is targeted at geographical areas of Surrey on the regeneration agenda. Focused largely on the 35+ age group, the business community, unemployed and disadvantaged groups, the emphasis of the communications programme is on learning for leisure rather than to gain a qualification, on learning for disadvantaged adults and in communities of disadvantage, and on family learning. It aims to reposition and modernise the service to attract new customers and increase the numbers of learners, while being careful not to alienate core markets and maintain existing learners.

CASE STUDY: IAPS

IAPS (the Independent Association of Preparatory Schools) is the professional association for Heads and Deputy Heads of the 600 leading preparatory schools in the UK and Worldwide. BOTTLE PR has been contracted for a 12-month period to work with IAPS to raise the value of its membership and to target so called ‘first time buyers’ – that is, parents who did not attend private school themselves but may now consider this option for their own children.

Three months into the contract we have identified and implemented several added value services including a partnership with an educational publication and the Guardian Learn programme. We have fantastic relationships with key national broadsheet and broadcast business and education correspondents and have generated excellent media coverage within the national papers, thus meeting our objective of demonstrating the quality and breadth of prep school education.

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