Making a big noise with savvy public relation to help protect Scotland’s businesses from cyber crime
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 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 raise awareness and understanding of its work, particularly among a Scottish business audience.
How did we do? Let’s just say there was nothing dodgy, suspect or sub standard about our amazing results – which saw us help the organisation to sell out a major conference while also massively increasing business leads for its new ‘ethical hacking’ service.
Across 12 months we tackled a series of separate projects for the SBRC. That included announcing the launch of its ethical hacking programme, a partnership with University of Abertay, which helps businesses find (and close) vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their systems.
We identified its first female recruit, Lisa Fiander. By comparing her with Lisbeth Salander, the character from the popular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series of books and movies, we created a cultural reference point that tapped into the imagination for the media with coverage across print, online and broadcast media.
For the cyber conference, ‘Trading Securely in Scotland’ we interviewed speakers ahead of the day, forming individual and informative media releases and a video, with a whopping 33 items of coverage directly referencing the gathering.
And we went even further. To establish Director Mandy Haeburn-Little and the SBRC as the leading voice on cyber in Scotland we also arranged a number of high impact ‘platform’ pieces, including BQ Magazine, Business Insider and Scotsman – establishing that informative and authoritative focal point to the SBRC in the press.
Our campaign smashed the targets we’d agreed with SBRC and the impressive results included:
- Delivering 127 significant items of coverage (10.6 per month) spanning all media
- Creating 20.6 million opportunities to see positive stories and messages about SBRC
- Ensuring important Key Messages were included in 100% of coverage.
- Helping the conference become a complete sell out, with all places snapped up weeks ahead of deadline.
- Doubling demand for the ethical hacking service – which also led to a 166 per cent increase in hackers recruited.
Mandy Haeburn-Little said: “Holyrood PR is fully embedded in all our own forward planning at the Centre and is part of our extended team.
“We would not consider holding a public facing conference or event without having had the planning discussion with the Holyrood team.
One of the main benefits of working with them is that they have no interest in spin – they are all about fact and reality and reflecting coverage of genuine importance and merit.”
Mandy Haeburn-Little said: “Holyrood PR is fully embedded in all our own forward planning at the Centre and is part of our extended team.FIND OUT HOW YOUR BUSINESS OR ORGANISATION COULD REAP THE BENEFIT OF GOOD PUBLIC RELATIONS
We’d love the chance to discuss how our range of award-winning public relations services could help you to dramatically improve your public profile.
We’re a chatty bunch at Holyrood PR, so please phone us on 0131 561 2244 or fill in the simple form, below, and we’ll get straight back to you:
Contact Form
