The Rory Peck Trust is a charity that supports freelance news gatherers and their families worldwide. Annually, the Rory Peck Awards honour freelance cameramen and women who bring stories to life in dangerous or difficult situations.

To promote its ongoing work, the organisation wanted to reach out to and connect with professionals in broadcasting, videography, video journalism and beyond through its awards scheme. It also wanted to generate long-term support, against a difficult economic backdrop, in a way that would be easy to maintain.  Bite needed to build a community of professional cameramen and encourage long-term engagement, raise awareness of the cause among potential advocates and sympathizers, and promote the charity and awards.

Prior to the campaign, the charity’s digital content was concentrated solely around its website. To generate long-term social engagement on a small budget, Bite developed:

• A video distribution system (with a consistent SEO tagging system)
• A Facebook page was personalised with a custom landing page and fan-only tab to host exclusive content and incentivise people to like the page
• A highly targeted Facebook advertising campaign
• The Facebook page was used as a central repository of content – videos, images and discussions were added to the page daily
• An exclusive, fan-only video was created
• A clickable awards ‘entrant’ badge was created and its embed code was given to entrants to use on their own web properties
• A Twitter hashtag was used on the day and evening of the awards and a Twitter handle was set up to enable the Trust to engage with influencers discussing the event
• Video reportage of the event was created by Bite, and then distributed alongside the other video content that underpinned the campaign
• Finally, Bite delivered a half day of digital and social media training to the Trust, to ensure the digital strategy could be sustained in the long term

The campaign achieved more than 30,000 video views of awards content on YouTube alone.  6,000 fans on Facebook, and 5,000 unique visitors to the Rory Peck Trust website during the awards period (more than 20,000 page views) – more than double its visitors in the same period of 2009.  Global interest was created and improved quality of editorial coverage achieved through high discoverability of content and availability of video content online. Coverage was achieved across target influencers including the BBC, CNN, Press Gazette, journalism.co.uk and Video Reporter.

This digital campaign has been both a reputational and financial success. Through Bite’s targeted campaign for the Rory Peck Trust, the charity has been able to increase its awareness through digital channels by creating a sustainable and engaged community of professionals and sympathisers and by making relevant content discoverable and available to those who want to find it.

“We worked with Bite’s digital team to promote the Rory Peck Awards online and build up an engaged international community for the future. The team was proactive, creative and knowledgeable – and really opened our eyes to the possibilities of social media.”

Molly Clarke, Head of Communications, Rory Peck Trust