Case Study - The Jericho Foundation - Nexgen Marketing with 58 Productions

Case Study – The Jericho Foundation

The Jericho Foundation changes lives through enterprise.  The Foundation seeks out and engages people who have experienced significant barriers to being fulfilled, skilled and employed.  To help them, the Foundation provides real work experience in one of its eight social enterprise businesses, combined with an individually-tailored package of personal development support for each client.

Jericho is a complex organization as the eight social enterprises, all have varying product and service offerings, some in the B2C space, some purely focusing on businesses. All of these enterprises are wholly-owned by a registered charity reflecting the organisation’s mission to help people into sustainable employment.

Jericho required a wide range of marketing direction, planning and implementation in order to gain further customers (especially large corporate organisations), more orders and extra patrons. It was essential to raise the profile and increase awareness of the Charity across the Midlands and further afield.

The challenge was to spread the word about the work that Jericho does, both from the “charitable” viewpoint but also from the “social business” standpoint, demonstrating that Jericho is a business you can trade with like any other, but one where your custom can make a tangible difference to the lives of local people in need.

In order to expand Jericho’s sphere of influence and build awareness, Roger joined a number of network marketing organizations, focusing on SME’s, the financial and legal sector and key local influencers with an interest in the social impact agenda.

Roger also decided to focus on the website, as it was clear that it needed development to generate demand and raise awareness. The website had a credible video, but was lacking up-to-date content, blogging, news articles and had little or no integration with social media. With only a limited budget, Roger decided to refresh rather than redevelop the website to drive traffic there and to make sure that when visitors arrived, there was a clear story to discover. Roger worked with a developer to make the website draw new and yet still maintain a good dialogue with existing customers to ensure loyalty and repeat purchases.

Furthermore, Roger performed a full audit of the marketing collateral across all the social enterprises and gradually updated these, including creating a new catalogue to promote Jericho print and the customized garments. With a large part of the customer “journey to purchase” taking place before actual engagement, it was important to ensure that appropriate collateral was also available as downloads from the website.

To drive additional traffic to the website, Roger signed the Charity up for Google AdGrants –free adverting for charities offered by Google. To start with, the number of visitors was quite small and the volume of new enquiries from the website was in single figures. After a few months however, the AdGrants activity started to give real results in terms of visitors, with a corresponding increase of sales leads to between 50 and 100 each month.

In such a large, multi-faceted organization, there have been a range of additional marketing challenges to face and Roger has helped address these against a background of a “zero based” expenditure budget. For example, limited reviews of product ranges, contracts and pricing had to be performed and Roger managed these while simultaneously empowering managers to have responsibility for their own areas.

Next, Roger applied for marketing funding but, as with all charities, money was a challenge. Having met at a networking event, Roger invited Stella to visit Jericho and they discussed what additional support he felt was required.

As Stella felt so passionately about the organisation she offered to provide pro bono PR and marketing support for 2 half days per month for 3 months from November 2015, in order to provide the essential help that was needed straight away. Roger was so delighted with the results of the initial communications and marketing efforts that he obtained approval to continue working with Stella on a monthly basis. Since January 2017 this activity has further increased to 2 full days per month.

Stella commenced regular blog post production (between 2-3 per month) to grow awareness of the excellent work that Jericho does and the wide range of services that it provides. We incorporate them on the website, in social media and in eMarketing. In addition, we have built a circulation list of online publications which frequently utilise these posts.

Stella has created press releases which regularly feature in the local press and appropriate online publications, generating excellent, cost-effective publicity and raising the profile of Jericho in the West Midlands and beyond.

We have commenced an eMarketing campaign and Stella has produced a plan/timetable and reporting procedures. Stella designs and creates the content of monthly eNewsletters, and reports back on results. Stella has made suggestions regarding the cleansing, development and ongoing management of the database and it has grown from 600 to over 3,500 contacts.

Stella provides support with social media including coaching members of staff, generating compelling content and building a database of posts which can be scheduled on a daily basis. Followers, engagement and interaction have all grown significantly in the last 17 months. Stella has now embarked on a full review of the written content of the website.

Stella takes responsibility for ad-hoc tasks such as producing a design brief in respect of a potential rebrand and an initiative to consider the social enterprises that have separate social media accounts and how to bring them under the wider “Jericho” umbrella (in order to capitalise on their following). Recently Stella has produced a draft business/marketing plan and series of priority marketing activities in respect of a possible relaunch of The Loft Workspace and also drafted a Social Media Guide for the proposed #JerichoInADay Social Media “Day”.

Stella also has regular involvement in one-off projects such as researching into charity van sponsorship and advising on internal communication with management regarding building the database (and social media support). In the past Stella has produced a Twitter Strategy for growing followers amongst accountants and churches and she performs research and provides information to other organisations in respect of their press releases regarding Jericho.

As well as performing much of the marketing planning and activities themselves, Roger and Stella have built extra capacity within the charity by encouraging and mentoring members of staff.

 “I met Stella at a BNI meeting in 2015 and was immediately impressed by her energy, knowledge and can-do attitude to PR. I had identified that there was a need within Jericho for excellent social media posts and other interactions including blogs and copy writing, so was delighted when Stella kindly offered to assist us on a pro bono basis until we could obtain suitable marketing funding. Now we have the funding in place, we are delighted to be able to retain Stella’s services and look forward to making the Jericho Foundation the “talk of the town”. Roger Bauckham, Sales and Marketing Manager - Jericho Foundation

Roger Bauckham and Stella Broster

07/04/17