01 Feb Macmillan: Leveraging Trends

During 2014, the not-for-profit sector went through big changes due to the viral success of the #nomakeupselfie and #icebucketchallenge initiatives and the huge amounts of money raised. These saw many charities investing time and resource into trying to develop ‘the next big thing’.

Among those was Macmillan Cancer Support, one of the most respected and well-known charities in the UK. I was contracted to pull together a bespoke training session for the organisation’s 30-strong communications team to help them integrate their PR and social media activities.

I devised a full-day session incorporating elements including data gathering and insight generation; influencer identification and engagement; effective creative idea generation; real-time marketing; and measurement and evaluation.

“Paul took the time to understand our brief and ensure we had a tailored session to meet the specific needs of the team. He used just the right combination of external examples to help spark creative thinking alongside some real Macmillan activities, demonstrating firsthand how we could do things differently by employing innovative new techniques.

Not only did the team come away inspired but they also had a whole new raft of tools and resources at their disposal to use in future work. This session provided the perfect platform for us to start exploiting social media much more effectively and we are already starting to think and work differently as a result.”

Emma Guise, Head of Media, Macmillan Cancer Support