One council, and a digital transformation story to tell
Written by Caitlin NapierOne of the things we love the most here at Mantis is developing relationships with our clients and their customers. One of my favourite partnerships so far has been with our client Arcus Global and its customer, St Albans City & District Council. We wanted to tell St Albans’ digitisation and transformation story, and elevate Arcus Global’s presence as a real leader in the digitisation of local government processes. In the process, we turned St Albans from a customer into an engaged advocate, and reached almost two million readers with their story.
St Albans’ old IT infrastructure was limiting its ability to provide the most exceptional citizen service. Over the past few years, Caroline Croft and Simonne deVall (digital & ICT manager and head of corporate services at St Albans respectively) have spearheaded the work with Arcus Global to implement a digital platform that enables the Council to easily switch-on a library of council processes online, create a single point of web access for citizens and give the Council a single view of how the citizen is interacting with its services. The whole digitisation process has also given the Council a host of new information and business intelligence to aid strategic decision making going forwards.
On working with Arcus Global, Caroline has commented: “We have valued Arcus Global’s local government expertise, its wide range of local government processes which can be shared and reused, and its guidance every step of the way.”
OBJECTIVES
Our aim was to raise the profile of St Albans and its digital transformation work, demonstrate its successes and pioneering developments and use it as a platform to promote Arcus Global as a transformation partner.
To help take St Alban’s story to its local authority peers, we had our sights set on top tier IT and public sector earned media outlets. Mantis client services director Anna Hennessey worked with Arcus Global’s head of marketing Kate Warboys, and Caroline and Simonne to write up a full case study of their digitisation project, which would then be adapted by account executive Caitlin Napier into further pieces of content to pitch to the media to secure earned media coverage.
We decided which media to prioritise first with the case study, to secure interviews for Caroline and place exclusive content, before branching out and targeting more publications.
The case study acted as a versatile piece, which could be adapted into further pieces of content such as a Q&A, an opinion article, and a press release.
RESULTS
Using interviews and the wide variety of content we produced, we have secured placements in seven major IT and public sector tech titles so far – the total reach for these is 1,800,000.
We were delighted with the results generated, seeing the benefits of repurposing content for different publications and trying many different pitching angles. It shows just what can be achieved with a single customer.
