PR

Promoting Rotherham as the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture

We were appointed by Rotherham Council in January 2022 as the marketing and communications agency for its ambitious Children’s Capital of Culture 2025 project. Our remit was to come up with an integrated campaign identity and communicate the town’s bold new ambition to its target audiences, with a high impact, high quality integrated marketing and comms campaign for the pilot project in 2022, which would give people a taste of what’s to come in 2025 for the South Yorkshire borough.

The 2022 pilot encompassed a never-seen-before programme of arts and culture events, wellbeing programmes, and a skills and employment strand funded by the UKCRF, which saw 55 young people from Rotherham gain traineeships in some of the region’s most renowned cultural venues and organisations, to improve their job prospects in these industries.

Ingredients
  • PR and media training
  • Copywriting
  • Social media strategy and content creation
  • Brand and content development
  • Design and print of brochures, flyers, banners and merch
  • OOH campaign including bus shelters, billboards and non-trad advertising
  • Video
  • Photography
  • Crisis management
  • Comms toolkit
  • Media training
  • Case studies of trainees in the skills programme
  • Paid social media
  • On-boarding ambassadors for the campaign
Recipe

We brought creativity, strategic thinking, grounding processes and fresh perspectives throughout the project, putting children and young people at the heart of our communications strategy. We created a panel of young people from Rotherham to test all our ideas with, and talked to head teachers and community leaders in Rotherham about what they wanted for the campaign. We met with editors of local media to turn flailing relationships around, and ran reader polls to gauge public support.

In our campaign execution, we thought creatively, as always. Rather than traditional advertising, for example, we made branded Children’s Capital of Culture cushions and put them in the seating areas in Rotherham’s 15 libraries, and covered park gates, fairground barriers, leisure centres and soft play centres with culture banners, translated into languages spoken by the local community.

 

Finished Dish

Our overarching brief was to let people know that Rotherham will become the world’s first Children’s Capital of Culture in 2025, and start to change the language about Rotherham. In 2022 the campaign achieved:

  • £290,000 value on media coverage, 3.9m reach through PR-led coverage alone and over 100 pieces of positive media coverage including TV and national
  • Over 10,000 pieces of printed collateral, including flyers, postcards, posters, A5 brochure, leaflets, mesh banners, pull-up stands, branded t-shirts, pencils, tote bags, rubbers and event selfie frames, distributed all over town, at cultural venues in the region and in schools
  • Digital screens in the town centre played 15,000 times (more than double what we paid for)
  • Rotherham United on-boarded to support the campaign
  • Campaign visibility in over 200 venues in South Yorkshire and at more than 30 events
  • A bank of powerful new photography and videography that shows Rotherham in a new light.

Through our comms campaign, we’ve delivered real impact. We have helped to generate a new sense of pride in Rotherham amongst its residents, by changing negative press headlines to positive. We shared the good news and changed the narrative about Rotherham, creating a step-change for the borough.

Because of the campaign’s huge success, we have since been retained for 2023.

Our client said: “We brought Content Soup in to support us on a very ambitious pilot programme to demonstrate what Rotherham could expect from Children’s Capital of Culture 2025 – all in a short six month window of funding. Nina and Jasmine hit the ground running, working quickly to develop creative ideas for stories, pull together collateral and press materials and build contacts with local and regional outlets. They brought creativity, energy and pace to the programme which had very little visibility both within and outside the borough to make a huge impact. Content Soup also come with an extended family of designers, artworkers, content editors and digital specialists who helped to take the start of a brand and develop this into a recognisable, playful and bold identity that has raised the profile of Children’s Capital of Culture 2025 and built a solid foundation for the programme as it moves into its next phase.”

“Content Soup brought creativity, energy and pace to the programme which had very little visibility both within and outside the borough to make a huge impact. They have raised the profile of Children’s Capital of Culture 2025 and built a solid foundation for the programme as it moves into its next phase.”