It’s common knowledge that we love a good bridge here at DTW Towers.
So, we’re delighted that Sunderland’s Northern Spire bridge has been nominated in the Institution of Civil Engineers’ (ICE) international People’s Choice Award.
The People’s Choice Award is decided by public votes, so it’s time to get involved and cast your vote today. Voting closes on September 27.
The awards celebrate the best civil engineering projects of the year from across the globe that have made a positive impact for their local communities.
Northern Spire is competing against a range of impressive projects, including the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge, the Shed cultural centre in New York City, the Colwyn Bay Waterfront in Wales, and a children’s surgery facility in Leeds.
We know we are biased, but we believe Northern Spire, which has dominated the Sunderland skyline since opening in August of last year, has what it takes to win.
Having provided communications and PR support to Sunderland City Council on this magnificent new bridge for three years, we appreciate the planning, effort and dedication that went into bringing this impressive structure to life by a team of more than 2,000 people.
Not only does Northern Spire look good, but innovative engineering methods were used to construct it, from building the deck in two sections on the riverbank and launching them out across the River Wear, to fabricating the massive 105m A-frame centerpiece in Belgium and sailing it to site.
We were privileged to work with such a team of skilled, experienced people on such a great project right here in the north east. We should all feel extremely proud of Northern Spire.
Emma Morton (left) and Ellie Dalton (right) with their certificates and DTW Director Lorna McAteer-Bingham
We’ve been doing our bit to recognise talented communicators of the future this month. We’ve sponsored the Public Relations prize at Teesside University’s annual Journalism Awards.
The joint winners of the Public Relations Student of the Year prize – Emma Morton and Ellie Dalton – will each spend a week on work experience at DTW over the next year to give them an insight into working life at a public relations and communications agency in 2019.
It was a pleasure to be invited to the awards evening at the Uni’s Love it Lounge and present Emma and Ellie with their prize. We’re looking forward to seeing them over the next few months and welcoming them to #teamDTW.
It’s important organisations in our industry are involved with initiatives like this. It gives students a chance to shine and learn and helps keep us businesses on our toes as well. In our experience, the ideas, creativity and passion that young graduates bring when working with us is a huge asset to DTW.
And we should know, we’re proud to say we have six Teesside graduates as part of our team. They are specialists in everything from animation and video to marketing strategy, and we’re regularly in and out of the University to chat to students and lecturers about various industry issues and opportunities.
Emma Morton (left) and Ellie Dalton (right) with their certificates and DTW Director Lorna McAteer-Bingham
We’re proud to say that DTW has again been ranked in the top ten specialist public sector public relations agencies in the UK by leading industry publication PR Week.
We have retained our position of 8th in the 2019 league table, which was published in May 2019. It means we’ve been in the top 10 for the past five years now.
As an agency that is highly skilled and experienced in working with the public sector over a long period of time, this continues to be important recognition for the work we deliver. The public sector – in the UK and elsewhere – has changed phenomenally, but the principles of good communications and PR remain the same.
Getting the basics right
Firstly, you have to understand the communications objectives, make sure you know who your audience is and do the insight and research work. Importantly, this makes sure you understand how your audience feels about the issue you are engaging with them on.
Then it is all about clear, authentic and honest communications – whether you are seeking to generate behaviour change, inform people about new initiatives or seek the views of residents and stakeholders on a new proposal.
Once you have those elements clear, you can think about the tactics, channels and creative themes you need to use for maximum impact.
This approach is relevant for so much more than public sector bodies, and the private sector increasingly needs to adopt it where it is delivering public services.
With the majority of our work focusing on that for membership organisations and private sector led infrastructure and construction developments, our skills and knowledge of the public sector market are proving valuable to our private sector clients.
So if you’ve got a challenging project coming up that you think would benefit from our public sector approach, we’d love you to get in touch.
Tips, insight, inspiration and enthusiasm – that’s what I came away with after attending the Membership Excellence 2019 conference yesterday.
With 700 delegates genuinely eager to learn – and a programme jam packed with speakers just as eager to share their knowledge and experience – the MemberWise event was an opportunity to take some time out and learn from forward-thinking membership organisations across many different sectors.
Organisations who face the same daily challenges as many of our clients, who are looking for solutions to the same problems and genuinely want to deliver value to their members.
Being on the agency side, the Membership Excellence conference really helped me think about things from our clients’ perspective. Enabling me to take a step back and appreciate the part our communications work plays in the overall member journey.
Building stronger relationships with members is key. But how do we do this? It’s all about understanding the motivations of our audience and communicating our value to different audiences in different ways. For some it’s about tangible benefits, while for others it’s the benefit to the overall cause they are supporting – capturing hearts and minds. Emma Day, Director of Membership at the British Horse Society illustrated this perfectly through some thought-provoking and powerful video.
It’s also about doing the right things at the right time in a member’s journey. Turning things up a notch and reinforcing member value at key points before renewals and saying thank you for member support at every opportunity.
Sian Hoggett, Head of membership and CRM at The British Museum and James Beardsworth-Shaw, Head of Commercial Services at the National Gallery brought this to life, sharing insights from each of their organisations through a fun and engaging joint presentation.
(MEMX highlights captured by Chapple Cartoons)
Another thing that resonated with me is how the enthusiasm of membership services teams has a direct impact on the members you’re trying to attract or retain. Success starts from the inside – get this right and you’re halfway there. If the team is empowered and enthused this shines through at member events, creating a buzz that gives members a more enjoyable experience.
Events like Membership Excellence really reinforce the value of knowledge sharing and networking with likeminded professionals. We’re all doing a lot of good stuff but through sharing our experiences, we can all do that little bit better.
How does having your own private social media army sound? Interesting…then please read on.
When it comes to posting content as a brand on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn it’s becoming increasing difficult to reach your audience if you just rely on organic (i.e. you don’t pay to promote it) content.
There is a rapidly diminishing return in terms of the natural organic performance of content – this can mean reach as low as 2% of your page’s audience – as networks push to make themselves more relevant to users and simultaneously try to grow revenue through advertising.
So, aside from reviewing the approach and tone of the content you’re posting or going cap in hand and asking for a bigger budget for promoted content on social media, what are the options?
Social advocacy
As I see it, the biggest opportunity for anyone delivering social media in 2019 has to be around harnessing the power of your employees as social media advocates who can utilise their personal social media channels to amplify your organisation’s messages and activity.
Advocacy grows the potential audience for your content beyond your owned channels to the networks of your employees and creates a more personal link between your messages and the audience – think of it as having your own private army of micro-influencers.
And you’ll be getting one over on those pesky algorithms. The platforms are much more likely to favour content that has been posted by an individual rather than an organisation.
Naturally, there are risks to taking this approach – you are delegating some control of your brand away from the carefully controlled confines of the marketing/communications team and in the hands of your employees, but with careful planning and oversight the risks to this can be negated.
For example, in our work with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, we have helped to train over 100 advocates on how they can effectively use their presence on social media (across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) to amplify the SRA’s messages in a time and place that suits them whilst at the same time enhancing their own presences on social media – a true win-win situation.
Training and resources
In conjunction with training, putting in place a system to centralise and track advocates not only ensures that sharing content is a simple and straightforward process, but also means you can track and reward the advocates who are doing the most to share content. There are a whole range of these platforms out there including Smarp (which we use in our work with the SRA) and Bambu which we have access to as part of our membership of Sprout Social’s Agency Partner programme.
We’re currently working on a whitepaper which will provide a much more detailed insight into how we see social media advocacy developing over the coming months, but in the meantime here are our three top recommendations for setting up an advocacy programme:
Plan ahead – make sure what you want to achieve from launching an advocacy programme is aligned with your organisation’s overall objectives
Support your advocates – consider ways you can train your advocates around effective use of social media, provide context and give them the confidence to take ownership of their work in the programme.
Put a structure in place to systemise the programme – this includes thinking about how you will disseminate the content you want to be shared, track the effectiveness of the programme and recognise/reward success.
If you want to register to receive a copy of our whitepaper when it’s published later in the spring or find out how you could make an advocacy programme work for your organisation get in touch with me – pete@dtw.co.uk or Jess – jess@dtw.co.uk – and we’d be happy to chat things through with you over a cup of coffee.
That was the conclusion of the expert panel at a great Centre for London event last night to launch its new report on the future of the transport network and road user charging in London.
I was there with our client emovis, whose Chief Exec Anthony Alicastro was on the panel to give an industry perspective in front of a packed ‘standing room only’ crowd of around 200 delegates including London Mayoral candidates, campaigners and assembly members.
So, what might happen in London?
The Centre for London report titled“Green Light: Next generation road user charging for a healthier, more liveable London”, calls for London to move towards an innovative new road user charging scheme which charges drivers on a per-mile basis. Costs would vary by vehicle emissions, local levels of congestion and pollution and availability of public transport alternatives – and prices would be set before the journey begins.
The scheme would be integrated with London’s wider transport system via a new app and digital platform, which the report proposes would be run by Transport for London. The scheme, which the report calls City Move would provide Londoners with more choice about how they travel around the city.
City Move would utilise the latest technology to give Londoners all their travel information in one place, allowing them to compare, plan and pay for journeys. Drivers, for example, would be presented with costs and impacts of using their vehicle versus alternative modes of transport.
It’s not policy yet – but the report’s authors are calling on all Mayoral candidates in the capital’s 2020 election to make a commitment to tackle the issue, and momentum is gathering, so watch this space
What’s the role for communications, PR and marketing?
Where do you start. It’s all about good communications. There are challenges around public acceptance of the introduction of road user charging or tolling, but in cities like London the debate has moved on – it is no longer about whether to charge people – it is about how to do it.
Our top three tips for communicating with the public and stakeholders on road user charging are:
Be clear on WHY you are introducing road user charging (e.g. to benefit the environment, to raise money for road improvements, to relieve congestion, to boost the economy). This doesn’t just shape what type of scheme you should deliver but it frames the public debate from day one.
Be clear how you are going to use the money raised. Transparency is critical for buy-in and focusing on the benefits you are delivering will be crucial.
Keep it simple – the great thing about the City Moveconcept is it keeps things as simple as possible for customers.
Once you get this strategic approach right you can get start being creative with the comms tactics and branding, but it is the messaging and positioning that sets the agenda and frames the discussion.
From our work on the merseyflow project and wider work with emovis over the past year on other schemes they are looking at around the world, it is clear this is something that both national governments and local authorities/major cities are looking at very closely.
In terms of maximising public acceptability, once you add in
the possibility of road user charging replacing road tax and maybe even fuel duty
an easy to use app that shows you the cheapest and quickest way to travel and gives you viable alternative public transport options
a scheme that can offer refunds if there are delays…..
…..then my view is this starts to become a very meaningful and realistic policy option.
For London, City Move would be healthier, fairer, simpler and greener than existing charging systems. Hard to argue against when you think about it.
Have you ever been bamboozled by a request for logos in a particular format or struggled to work out why that 5KB version copied from a word document can’t be made the size of the Empire State Building?
Then read on. We’ve created a simple starter guide to make your life a lot easier.
Your company logo probably exists in a whole range of formats.
The different formats can be identified by their extension, e.g. logo.jpg or logo.eps etc. But why are there so many formats? And which one should you use for different things?
The most common/useful formats and their best uses are:
EPS
These large files are the holy grail to a designer. An EPS file (known as a vector file) can be scaled to any size without losing clarity. They are perfect for print work and, as they are often the master file can be saved into other formats.
SVG
These are usually developed for web work, but these vector files will always be crisp and clear at whatever size they’re used. The small file size makes this format a good all-rounder.
PDF
You’ll recognise pdfs as being more often used as downloadable documents, but they can be used to provide a logo, as long as the logo was a vector file (not JPEG or PNG). As Acrobat Reader is free to download it is an increasingly common and accessible file format.
JPEG
This file format has different qualities like low, medium and high. Usually used to store photographs, image posts on social media, emails and websites. This format is great for digital work – although it doesn’t support a transparent background – low resolution (72dpi and small in dimensions) is not recommended for print work.
PNG
This has all the features of a JPEG file but supports a transparent background, which means no more unwanted white patches around your logo. This format is ideal for PowerPoint presentations and Word documents. Again, low resolution (72dpi and small in dimensions) is not recommended for print work.
Does it really matter? The answer is yes if you want to put your best foot forward. You can see from the different versions of the DTW logo included here what a difference it makes.
Recap
Best logo file for digital purposes – PNG files
Best logo file for print purposes –EPS files
And finally, three top tips to remember.
Changing the extension manually on a file (e.g. from a .jpg to a .eps) sadly does not alter the type of file – if only!
On behalf of our design team, please don’t send your company logo embedded in a word or excel document!
If you haven’t got or can’t find the right format, try your marketing or design team – whether they are in-house or outsourced – they will (or they should!) know exactly what you are talking about and be happy to help.
As DTW marks its 30th year in business there’s a significantly bigger birthday going on over our garden wall.Our neighbour Gisborough Priory is celebrating 900 years.
Gisborough Priory is an English Heritage site which is run by a dedicated group of volunteers who catalogue, restore and host events on this historic site. To launch its 900th year, DTW joined forces to help produce a timeline, which is displayed in the visitor centre, detailing the many events the priory has endured through its turbulent lifetime.
We were happy to give our services free of charge as it’s important to look out for your elderly neighbours.
PS – the spelling pedants amongst you (we know who you are and we salute you – you are amongst friends here!) might think we have a challenge spelling our home town.
But don’t worry, it’s OK.
Guisborough is the correct spelling for the place and for our address, but very confusingly Gisborough is the correct spelling for the Priory (and the nearby Gisborough Hall Hotel).
Recent headlines around data and social media means both consumers and marketeers are feeling wary about using and sharing data on platforms like Facebook. Is data being used ethically? How can it be used to effectively target the right audience?
This blog is not here to scaremonger. Instead, it is going to show you how, when done right, targeting using social data is a win/win for everyone involved.
We’re going to focus on Facebook, but LinkedIn and Twitter have similar advert targeting platforms and functionalities.
How targeting works
Once a consumer has signed up and accepted those terms and conditions (the ones we all accept, but hardly ever read), a social network can start gathering information on them. They look at who they follow, which posts they like, where they log on from, what device they log on from and – through cookies – what sites they visit.
It’s worth noting that social networks like Facebook are not unusual when it comes to this data gathering – Google is just the same.
The networks then provide this information, confidentially, to advertisers so they can serve content that they think is relevant to the consumer. For example, if a consumer has interacted with a lot of fitness and swimming content from their phone, and you are running the new swimming baths nearby, you might want to advertise your new swimming lessons to them when they’re on their phone next.
Image source: Buzzfeed
How to target effectively
Poor targeting is the thing that gives social data a bad name. If you’re a passionate swimmer, you’re not really interested in seeing an advert for expensive running shoes. You also don’t particularly want to see an advert too specific: “You love swimming, why not try running instead?”. This can, quite rightly, freak people out.
Facebook has advertising policies that outline what advertisers can and can’t put in their adverts to ensure the content is relevant to their users. Users can also access, and limit, the information Facebook provides advertisers via their account settings (and for the record, Facebook doesn’t listen to our conversations).
When you first start looking to run an advertising campaign on Facebook, the best place to start is Audience Insights. This helps you define who would be best suited for your content and see how you can make it relevant to them. Again, let’s reiterate, this is all confidential data, there will never be any personal information like names, emails and addresses available to advertisers.
When you go to Facebook Audience Insights, you can filter for users within certain locations, demographics or interests. Once you’ve defined those filters, you can look at which pages they like, how they interact with posts, and what devices they use.
So, with our swimming example – we can see that the people we’ve defined on the left are more likely to click on ads than the average Facebook user, and use Facebook on their iPhones more than desktop.
Then, once we’ve got that audience defined, we can save it and use it when setting up an advertising campaign.
During this time, Facebook helpfully tells you if your audience is defined enough to run a decent campaign as seen here – the target is always to be in the green.
With this information, we can create relevant ad content for our audience, and make sure our ads look good on mobile.
Once your campaign is up and running, you’ll get a relevance score, which is a number between 1 and 10 that tells you how your target audience is responding to your ad. The higher the score, the more relevant your ad to your audience. This will hopefully mean that your audience is seeing the right content for them and won’t be annoyed or disappointed at seeing your content in their news feed.
Conclusion
We’ve established the sort of data that social networks can get from a user, and how it is used for advertising purposes, but the key thing to remember is that the better the targeting, the happier your audience will be and the more effective your marketing will become.
Here are some key things to remember to make sure you target your audience correctly:
Don’t be too broad or too niche – you want to cast a net wide enough to get your message out, but not too wide that people who wouldn’t be interested in your content get annoyed at seeing your ads in their feeds.
Tailor your content to your audience – using Audience Insights is a great way to get a steer on the kind of content that works for your audience.
Stay relevant – if your relevance score is under 5, have a look at your campaign results (in ads manager). See where people are clicking, who is clicking and tweak your targeting accordingly.4. Talk to an expert – If you’re really struggling, or just want a sense check, there are plenty of social media experts who know the ins and outs of good audience targeting.
DTW has signed up to a new scheme all about giving young people from across the Tees Valley a taste of working life to help them become ‘work-ready’ as they set out on their career journey.
Chris Taylor, Managing Director of DTW, said: “We’re always happy to help young people step onto the career ladder and the Tees Valley Careers approach is great. It’s genuinely one of the best and most employer friendly initiatives I have seen.”
The appeal of the Tees Valley Careers scheme is that it isn’t just about offering work experience. For a small business like ours that can be a challenge due to client commitments and logistical challenges, particularly for school age children.
The scheme gives employers options like going into schools and chat to students, take part in mock interview exercises and careers days. We think these can be hugely valuable to young people in our area. The opportunities are all co-ordinated by the Tees Valley Careers team which minimises the ‘hassle factor’. It means employers like DTW can get involved when there are opportunities that fit in with our industry and which work for us.
For young people looking to take their first step into the world of work, anything they can do to engage with employers and gain a better understanding of work situations will really help them in their early careers.
Chris added: “We’re passionate about helping young people as they start out in their career. This is a great initiative that is local to us and something we’re very much looking forward to being involved with.”
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4. Talk to an expert – If you’re really struggling, or just want a sense check, there are plenty of social media experts who know the ins and outs of good audience targeting.