Archives Wales: Explore Your Archives Week
Making news from olds, our team grabbed national headlines and social shares with a campaign encouraging people to discover something new and exciting within the nation’s archives, winning a CIPR gold award for the best arts and culture campaign of the year.
Objectives
- Increase public awareness and raise the profile of local, university and private archives.
- Raise awareness of the value of the essential role archives play in society.
- To encourage people to use an archive service whether physically, or via digital services.
- To remind people that although some services may be physically closed or have limited access due to Covid-19, that services are still available digitally, including online catalogues, email enquiry services and paid research services.
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Pieces of coverage
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Coverage reach
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Social reach
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Web traffic to Gwent Archive
Content from the Campaign
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Archives Wales was looking for a partner to raise awareness and engagement with archives, the most underused of our cultural services.
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- We created a range of themed daily stories tapping into the news agenda and current cultural conversations. Our media relations helped secure a mass of national and regional coverage, and social content reached thousands of people.
- The campaign coincided with millions of viewers across the UK spending their evenings watching celebrities survive viper vaults and other such squeamish tasks, as I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! took over a castle in north Wales. But before Ant and Dec rocked up, Gwrych Castle in Abergele had a long and storied history. We worked with archivists to uncover a property listing from 1946 when the castle was for sale. We’ve secured coverage all over the UK for the story, with Daily Mirror, Metro, Walesonlineand scores of others splashing on our story.
- Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives found a 19thcentury Welsh phrasebook to help English tourists speak to “peasants” and we knew this was the kind of item which would do well if packaged into a story and sold into our contacts. We secured across the UK including on The Sun, The Guardian, The Telegraph, ITV News and the Irish Independent and in the print editions of The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, i, Metro, Western Mail, South Wales Echo, Daily Post and Yorkshire Post, reaching hundreds of millions of people
- We created bilingual social content for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and had a reach of 102,568 and resulted in 135 new followers, and 87 individual link clicks, sending people to the archive services in just ten days.
- The campaign won gold at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations Pride Awards in October 2021 for best arts, culture or sport campaign.
