People's Collection Wales: ‘A Nation Telling its Own Story’
Casgliad y Werin – People’s Collection Wales is a Welsh Government-funded bilingual programme that enables individuals to celebrate Wales’ history through the sharing of their personal stories. It comprises a website, innovative technological applications and a dedicated team that goes into Welsh communities to train individuals and groups in using the site and sharing their content. Our brief was to encourage the people of Wales to make their own contributions through an upload function.
Objectives
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To increase the average number of contributions from the general public by 50 per cent per quarter
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To increase the number of hits to the People’s Collection Wales website from the baseline figure at the start of the campaign by five per cent each quarter
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To achieve media coverage in each of Wales 22 unitary authorities.
Our approach
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As contributions from the public could literally be about anything-from their parent’s wedding photo to a snap of the church in their village-we identified target audiences and key themes each month to ensure that the campaign had focus
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We targeted local press, and crucially, to target digitally excluded, older generations who were likely to have a wealth of content valuable to the Collection, we worked with local Welsh language community newsletters called Papurau Bro
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To bring the story to life, where possible, we would engage with local characters as case studies so that other local people could identify with their story. These included a former miner at Maerdy, the ‘Last Pit in the Rhondda’, who went on to work at the local mining heritage park; or a TV chef who uploaded her grandmother’s old recipes
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Social media was used to support traditional media work, and to speak to a global, digitally engaged audience, as well as journalists. Content suitable for tweeting on key dates was identified, which increased traffic to the website but also resulted in further traditional media coverage.
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In addition to this, we created the platform for a blog, along with a content calendar tying up with media activity, where each theme was explored and shared on social media sites.
Results
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Number of contributions from the general public increased from an average of 442 per quarter before the campaign to an average of 1525 pre quarter, which is an increase of 71 per cent
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Number of hits to the website from the baseline figure at the start of the campaign increased by 8.44 per cent to 39,981 between July to September 2011 and an increase of 9.31 per cent to 40,366 for October to December 2011
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Media coverage successfully achieved in online, print, radio and TV outlets in each of Wales 22 unitary authorities.