“Vanilla Public Relations gives us access to senior consultants that we just wouldn’t get with a traditional PR agency. The team are proactive and provide me with solid PR advice whilst producing excellent results, they offer superb value for money.”
Case Studies The IT Job Board The IT Job Board is an online recruitment specialist serving the IT community. A young company with ambitious growth targets, it needed to raise awareness both within the HR sector and amongst IT candidates. Vanilla Public Relations started working with The IT Job Board in May 2006, developing and implementing a PR programme that focused on compelling business issues affecting the IT sector. These included ageism, women in IT, offshoring, staff retention, flexible working and MIFID compliance. Where possible these were made topical by linking them with current issues – for example the ageism campaign was timed to run in conjunction with the introduction in the UK in October 2006 of new employment laws making it illegal to discriminate on the grounds of age. PR work revolves round generating news stories, often via an online survey about the issue in question. Results are announced by press release and reinforced by the provision of expert guides (developed by The IT Job Board with guidance from Vanilla Public Relations) which, offered as a free download from the IT Job Board website and promoted in the release, drive traffic to the site and therefore act as a key awareness-raising tactic. The PR programme also focuses on placing and drafting bylines, again on issues affecting the IT sector, to position The IT Job Board as an industry expert, and develop relationships with key publications. Coverage has been achieved in all target publications, and a total of 500 pieces has appeared to date. Palisade Palisade develops and sells risk analysis software to a wide range of organisations – many of which are extremely high-profile – in a variety of industry sectors. The company needed to develop its profile to reflect its market leader status and support its sales function. Although highly sophisticated, its technically complex products have limited news value outside the immediate risk community. Vanilla Public Relations therefore developed and implemented a PR programme focused on proactive generation of customer case studies to provide real-life illustrations of risk analysis in practice. As well as researching and drafting the material, this involves effective communication of the process to Palisade's customers and adhering to strict approval processes to ensure that the finished case study meets the individual corporate requirements of each organisation. It is also intended that the case study is perceived by the customer to be valuable marketing collateral to them. Completed case studies are placed in trade, technical and vertical media, and used to target features in relevant publications. They are also posted on the website and used as sales and marketing collateral. |
