Product Type:
Strategy & Consultancy
Customer Type:
Third Sector/Non-Profit
Industry:
Food
Niche:
Sustainability
Year:
2021- ongoing
Overview
I have had the pleasure of working with ShefFood since 2021. Sheffield’s food partnership is a non-profit organisation that is spearheading the growth of a sustainable food system in Sheffield. They needed someone to take over their comms and marketing strategy to help grow their reach and support both partner organisations and the public as a whole. After winning the Bronze Sustainable Food Places Award for Sheffield, the next goal was to claim the Silver. The comms would be a vital part of the success.
Challenges
The key challenges for ShefFood were its small audience and reach within the city; it needed to be a city-wide brand. The difficulty for the comms side was that ShefFood needed support in many areas, including content for newspapers and online, social media management, email comms and overall strategy, all on a limited budget.
Objectives
To provide a consistent comms strategy and implementation every week to raise the organisations profile, keep partners and public aware of our work and help them discover resources for a thriving local food system in Sheffield.
Suggested Solutions
Our main suggestion was to build the comms strategy around the six key areas of the Sustainable Food Places guidelines. Not only would this provide an outline for marketing, but it would also help align our strategy with the work needed to achieve the Silver award. Another key area to ensure the budget was spent most efficiently was to ensure that all content did double duty, with articles being edited and posted in several places, broken down for social media and reused for the email newsletter as well.
Implementation
As this has been an ongoing relationship, we’ve continually developed and honed the strategy over the past 18 months with ShefFood’s coordination team.Initially, the main focus was to create a consistent stream of comms for Sheffield’s local population. Concentrating on promoting the purpose and work of ShefFood, elevating partner organisations and providing helpful information on food and sustainability. I produced 3 to 4 articles a month, maintained social posting on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and consistently put out an email newsletter every month full of articles, the latest research, events, job postings and much more.As ShefFood and its partner organisations took part in projects and research, we were able to use this information as the basis of much of our content. For example, in collaboration with Regather and the University of Sheffield, 8 students undertook research projects focused on local food, farming, health and sustainability. These reports laid the basis for countless articles, infographics and social posts throughout the year. Access to this work and my own research ensured there was always a consistent stream of content in all our comms outlets, and we were able to plan campaigns up to 7 months ahead. This grew both the website’s traffic and the organisation’s online reach.
Results
It’s been a fantastic opportunity working with ShefFood, and we’ve created a complete comms strategy to keep ShefFood in the public eye whilst supporting the needs of partner organisations. From a digital perspective, we’ve seen a rapid increase in organic search traffic and social media traffic, with increases month on month. The results below are from 2023- 2024
From 4400 to 8000 visitors a year
Through our resource expansion and consistent content schedule (posting one a week), we've been able to attract almost double the number of people visiting the website from 4,400 in 2023 to over 8000 in 2024, that's a 81% Increase in users. I've produced over 200 pieces of original content for the site and publications throughout the city.
From 9400 to 20200 views a year
Our consistent posting and continual updating of the site has meant we have a very engaged following and people continually come back to the site again and again to get new information and look up existing resources. From 9400 in 2023 to 20,200 in 2024, that's a 115% increase.
Expanded Social presence & Brand Awareness
We've now got over 400 subscribers to our newsletter, over 800 Facebook followers, over 1700 Instagram followers and have just launched our LinkedIn page in January 2025. Our search