- Increase public awareness and raise the profile of local, university and private archives.
- Raise awareness of the value of the essential role archives play in society.
- To encourage people to use an archive service whether physically, or via digital services.
- To remind people that although some services may be physically closed or have limited access due to covid-19, that services are still available digitally, including online catalogues, email enquiry services and paid research services.
- 95 pieces of coverage with a reach of 695m
- 9 pieces of national coverage including the Mirror, The Sun, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Metro and the Mail Online.
- Creating 95 pieces of social media content across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with a reach of 102,568, 5,351 engagements and resulted in 134 new social media follows organically over just 10 days.
- 87 social media link clicks directing people to the archive’s websites.
- Doubling the website traffic to the Gwent Archive’s website.
Archives Wales were looking for a partner to raise awareness and engagement with archives, the most underused of our cultural services. We did this by creating a range of themed daily stories tapping into the news agenda and current cultural conversations. Our media relations helped secure a mass of national and regional coverage, and social content reached thousands of people.
Press
We drafted a total of eight bilingual press releases sold into contacts both nationally and regionally across print, online and broadcast. The press releases all gave information on the archives and how best to start exploring, with the aim to inspire people to get involved and learn.
Gwrych Castle
The campaign coincided with millions of viewers across the UK spending their evenings watching celebrities survive viper vaults and other such squeamish tasks, as I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! took over a castle in north Wales. But before Ant and Dec rocked up, Gwrych Castle in Abergele had a long and storied history. We worked with archivists to uncover a property listing from 1946 when the castle was for sale. We’ve secured coverage all over the UK for the story, with Daily Mirror, Metro, Walesonline and scores of others splashing on our story.
19th century phrasebook
Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives found a 19th century Welsh phrasebook to help English tourists speak to “peasants” and we knew this was the kind of item which would do well if packaged into a story and sold into our contacts. We secured across the UK including on The Sun, The Guardian, The Telegraph, ITV News and the Irish Independent and in the print editions of The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, i, Metro, Western Mail, South Wales Echo, Daily Post and Yorkshire Post, reaching hundreds of millions of people.
Further press releases were on:
- Documentation of the Caernarfon cholera epidemic
- Green Shield Stamp catalogue from the 1960s
- Narbeth poster promoting the medicinal properties of wine
- Nostalgic school menus from Crosskeys College
- Christmas plans letter from South Wales miner during Spanish Civil War.
- General release
Social media
On social media, we created bilingual content in both Welsh and English around a daily theme which helped focus the content on a different area of the archives; these themes included communications, health, education and light. We worked with the archivists across Wales to gather and create the content which helped promote the individual archives and archives as a whole.
We created bilingual social content for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and had a reach of 102,568 and resulted in 135 new followers, and 87 individual link clicks, sending people to the archive services in just ten days.
Gwrych castle from Working Word on Vimeo.
