Business Resilience tech PR Case Study

Challenge

Modern businesses face a host of criminal threats greater than ever before, from hackers, forgers, counterfeiters and fraudsters.
Providing a bridge between businesses and the authorities, the Scottish Business Resilience Centre tackles areas of commercial threat, including metal theft, human trafficking and illicit trade in fake and forged goods.
However, its biggest challenge is to establish itself over private sector rivals as the centre for advice, leadership and collaboration on cyber crime.
To ensure its messages cut through in an increasingly noisy world, the SBRC turned to the team at Holyrood PR, challenging us to deliver a series of projects across 12 months to raise awareness and understanding of its work, particularly among a Scottish business audience.

Objectives

Two projects were identified as most important to the SBRC – the launch of its ethical hacking programme and it cyber conference, ‘Trading Securely in Scotland’.
We also identified a series of other possible stories to help highlight the organisation’s work, with a particular focus on securing platform interviews for director, Mandy Haeburn-Little.
Targets included:
Delivering an average of five items of media coverage per month.
Creating at least five million opportunities to see (OTS) messages about the work of the SBRC
Ensuring 60% penetration of agreed Key Messages in coverage
Delivering five articles each promoting the conference and the ethical hacking service
Aiming for at least 90% of places at the event were taken up.
Five significant items of coverage promoting the service
Increase demand for Ethical hacking to drive 50 per cent growth in the programme.

What we did

We announced the launch of the ethical hacking programme, which helps businesses find and close vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their systems.
By focusing on its first female recruit, Lisa Fiander, we drew comparisons with Lisbeth Salander, the character from the popular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series of books and movies, creating a cultural reference point that fired the imagination of the media.
For the cyber conference, ‘Trading Securely in Scotland’ we interviewed speakers ahead of the day, forming individual and informative media releases.
Highlights include tips for small business; demonstrating how drones could be used to hack mobile phones; warning how simple text messages can lead to major network hacks; and highlighting scams aimed at online shoppers.
To establish Director Mandy Haeburn-Little as the leading voice on cyber in Scotland we arranged high impact ‘platform’ pieces in BQ Magazine, Business Insider and The Scotsman.