NEIGHBOURLY

Communications strategy, Earned media relations

Neighbourly is an award-winning giving platform that matches businesses with local good causes. Neighbourly was founded in 2014 to help businesses deliver meaningful and sustainable community investment, into thousands of locations across the UK and Ireland

The brief given to AMBITIOUS was to review and devise a plan to take the latest Neighbourly community survey to the media, with an aim of securing national, regional, and trade coverage.

The study looked at over 1,300 community organisations and charities and aimed to uncover the experiences of these organisations in the first few months of the cost-of-living crisis, and the effects it has had on them being able to deliver critical services to those in need.

To gain maximum national and regional exposure for Neighbourly, the community survey results, and the organisations being affected by the cost-of-living crisis and to communicate their stories.

Given the national significance of this research and its findings, a plan was created to specifically target Press Association and their Social Affairs correspondent. The findings, as well as interviews and case studies, were offered on an exclusive basis to maximise coverage.

We analysed the research findings and worked with the Neighbourly team to identify the key stats and media angles. We identified a clear and impactful angle that would resonate best with the Press Association journalist we were approaching.

Once the storyline was agreed upon we began to develop the feature package, which we would take to the journalist on an exclusive basis. This package consisted of:

  • Exclusive access to the full Neighbourly community survey results
  • Comment from Steve Butterworth, Neighbourly CEO
  • Comment from one or more community organisations from the Neighbourly network

The package, including quotes from both Neighbourly and one of the community organisations, were featured alongside a number of key findings from the research, and formed part of a wider feature around the cost-of-living crisis developed by the journalist.

The article was distributed across the Press Association UK network, and resulted in:

  • 239 pieces of coverage across top tier national, regional, and trade media titles
  • National hits with The Independent, Mail Online, MSN UK, Yahoo News
  • 245m media reach

We continue to work with Neighbourly on an ongoing press office brief.