Challenges

The Red Rose Awards is one of Lancashire’s leading business awards, celebrating private, public and third-sector successes across the county. With a limited headcount at the event, they wanted to give people at home a chance to celebrate and share in the successes, whilst providing assets that could be used to help sell sponsorship packages for future events.

The Red Rose Awards events team was focused on hosting the event so they needed a dedicated team who could capture the joy of the winners, the scale of the ceremony and create a “fear of missing out”, all whilst sharing the best bits on Twitter as they happen for anyone who couldn’t make the event.

Solution

Prepare, prepare, prepare: We began way before the event started, planning around the run sheet, completing venue recess, test shoots and pre-preparing any outgoing social media content we could, both for outgoing messages and being able to sign-post anyone tweeting from within the venue. We also got a sneak peek at all the winners and prepared all the announcement tweets, ensuring the brand broke the news at each turn.

Execution: Our film crew sprung into action hours before guests arrived, getting establishing shots, b roll and filming guests arriving. We continued to shoot and snap throughout the night, capturing all of the key moments on camera; we were carefully positioned to catch winners' faces as they were announced, we were front of stage for the keynote speakers and we were in the thick of it on the dancefloor for the afterparty, too. We got some of the footage live on the night, sharing HQ pictures and video content across social media. In the edit, we considered the theme of each ceremoney and carried this through to the film.

Our social media coverage spanned the evening, signposting guests to key information, making key announcements about nominees, winners and sponsors, and sharing highlights with people following along at home. We were engaging on the account all evening, with our core focus being the expand the brand reach as far as possible.

Impact

We’re so adept at handling the Red Rose Awards event social media and video that we retained the contract for 7 consecutive years. Repeatedly, we gained huge traction with the awards often getting the night trending nationally on Twitter.

As well as proving successful in terms of share of voice online, we were also able to successfully use social media to manage the mood on the night when things went awry, like turning frustrations over food into #Chipgate and signposting delegates to use table service to reduce bar queues.

Perhaps the biggest marker of success was seeing consistent event growth year on year: the guest list grew, the venue adapted to suit more tables and the list of award categories grew along with it. Crucially, those all-important sponsorship packages were consistently sold, a testament to the wonderful event and the stunning series of films we’ve created capturing the essence of the event over a 7-year period.