Content
Writing Northern Gas Network’s Annual Innovation Report
Innovation is stitched into the fabric of everything NGN does, from replacing pipes, to supporting its most vulnerable customers. Through trailblazing projects and ideas, they are delivering some life-changing benefits to 2.7 million homes and businesses across the North East, Northern Cumbria and Yorkshire, while helping to facilitate a low carbon economy.
NGN chose Content Soup to write its Annual Innovation Report 2023, taking what has historically been quite a long, convoluted document and making it more to the point and more engaging to the reader. It needed to hit differently to what had been done before (our speciality).
– Copywriting
– Proofreading
NGN receives funding from Ofgem for innovation projects that either address challenges faced by vulnerable customers, or facilitate a greener future. Because Ofgem funds them, they require evidence that the projects have worked, or are working, so this annual innovation report sums things up nicely for them.
We got straight to work reviewing previous annual reports, looking at what had worked and hadn’t, and delving into competitor reports. We could clearly see where this year’s report needed to go, which was saying more in less words, with a bigger focus on NGN’s innovation projects and their groundbreaking results.
Our job was to make the innovative projects come to life on paper, translating what could often be very complex information into high impact summaries. We interviewed innovation leaders at NGN to get under the skin of what they do best, we talked to project managers and asked them to explain complicated projects as if we were their grans, we hooked up with partner companies to figure out their contributions, and we poured through long presentations and documents to extract the best information.
And then we got to work writing.
During the tight six-week project, we seamlessly delivered this year’s new and improved annual innovation report, cutting it down by half. We had weekly progress meetings with the client team, and allowed a week’s turnaround for amends following the first copy submissions – however, these were minimal, thanks to us doing the real work at the beginning to get a grasp of this project, the contents required, the language we needed to use and managing everyone’s different expectations of it.
Once we’d agreed the contents and written the content, we worked with the design team to make this report sing. We provided our eagle eye proofreading services for the final document, and voila, the report was delivered to Ofgem three days before deadline.
The client said: “Content Soup were challenged to summarise the past year’s innovation projects in NGN’s annual gas distribution report. The scope was handed over and Content Soup took on the task straight away, with very little guidance. Throughout the duration of the project, the team were easy to contact and always on hand to help out. This allowed for great communications between both parties with an open dialogue throughout. Content Soup provided the copywriting for the report by conducting interviews and collating all of the information together, on top of this they helped with a thorough proofread of the report. The team were great throughout, providing a high quality product as well as being personable. They added value by providing a trustworthy/honest opinion on the report, helping with the reader’s perspective.” Lewis Kirkwood, NGN Innovation Manager