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:
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.