Story about the world’s first nationwide public art trail makes UK-wide headlines

WHEN the Edinburgh Children’s Hospital Charity (ECHC) announced it was to be part of the largest ever public art trail in Scotland, it came to us to ensure the story was rolled out as far and wide as possible.

Oor Wullie’s BIG Bucket Trail will take place in Scotland in Summer 2019 to support the work of three of the country’s children’s hospital charities – ECHC, the ARCHIE Foundation and Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity.

The project aims to help raise funds for the charities to allow young people undergoing treatment to be a child first and a patient second. The money will be raised through the art trail itself, associated events and five city auctions.

When First Minister Nicola Sturgeon launched the event at the Scottish Parliament, it was essential that an experienced PR agency, adept at charity PR, was on hand to pitch the story to the correct people in the media to achieve as much coverage as possible.

Our team set to work on pitching the story to a host of national, local and trade titles across the length and breadth of the United Kingdom and the results were humbling.

From big ticket coverage with the likes of ITV News and national print titles, to local titles from every nook and cranny of the country, you’d have been hard pressed to miss the story in the newspaper, online, social media, TV or radio.

Oor Wullie was certainly “A’body’s Wullie” (for our non-Scottish readers, that mean’s “Everybody’s Wullie” when it came the media interest the PR launch managed to generate:

• Appearances across a whopping 166 media outlets
• National coverage on huge news sites including ITV, Planet Radio, MailOnline and AOL.com
• Print coverage in major titles such as the Daily Record, The Sunday Post, The Herald and The Scotsman among many others
• Incredible local coverage thanks to a contact at the Press Association, resulting in hits in titles from 132 local titles from Shrewsbury to Skegness
• A total of 4,165,857 opportunities for people to see the story

The broad sweep of coverage was essential to give the BIG Bucket Trail a real boost and a strong launchpad for the story to progress and become as big a success as possible.

Not only does such an extensive range of coverage give prominence to the Bucket Trail, it also raises awareness about the amazing work the three charities do to transform the lives of young people and makes people more likely to dig deep and give what they can to support them.

Ways to donate and the promotional film can be found here.

Do you want to bask in the glow of media coverage like Oor Wullie?

Get in touch with one of our team today to find out how we can give your business the PR push to hit the headlines.