Celebrating success: Stand celebrates double victory, winning two PR awards

August 17, 2023 Written by Ember Lamas and Lucy Knowles

Tags: communications leadership Media PR public relations

We’re delighted to share that our PR efforts secured us not one but two award wins last month. We’ve been awarded the Alliance of Independent Agencies’ Freedom Award for our work with Kroo Bank and the Best Integrated Digital PR Campaign Award for our work with Tommy’s at this year’s UK Digital PR Awards.

Learn more about us and our award-winning work with Kroo and Tommy’s below.

More about us

We’re an award-winning, B Corp-certified comms consultancy. We’re here for the trailblazers who believe in better. We disrupt sectors, build brands, shift mindsets and change behaviours.

Since launching a decade ago, we have a long-standing track record of crafting campaigns that address issues at the heart of our society – from tackling health inequalities or asking big questions about the purpose of the education system to reframing later life or addressing public attitudes to renewables in their community.

At Stand, one of our values is ‘make change happen’. We believe in the power of communications to make an impact, so winning the Best Integrated Digital PR award for our #InThisWithYou campaign with Tommy’s, and the Freedom Award for our work with Kroo, is incredibly rewarding.

Who are Tommy’s?

Tommy’s is the largest UK pregnancy and baby loss charity, dedicated to finding causes and treatments to save babies’ lives, as well as providing trusted pregnancy and baby loss information and support.

The challenge

Our challenge was to raise awareness of a new support hub for partners on the pregnancy journey – a largely unsupported and overlooked audience. A large subgroup of partners is men, and it’s widely documented that it’s harder to encourage men to speak about their feelings or show vulnerability. Research shows men are less likely to access therapy – with only 36% of referrals to NHS talking therapies and men making up 73% of missing adults.

We also needed to strike a balance tonally, showing dads and partners that Tommy’s is ‘for them’ while continuing to resonate with people on a positive pregnancy journey but feeling anxious and those experiencing miscarriage or baby loss.

The campaign

Our campaign prompted a desperately needed conversation about baby loss about how pregnancy affects both parents. Did you know that 70% of partners felt support for them during and after pregnancy was either not good or non-existent? By raising awareness of Tommy’s new support hub for partners on their pregnancy journey, we showed dads and partners that support is ‘for them’ too.

We created a platform #InThisWithYou with its own look and feel, rooted in the Tommy’s brand, but specifically for the partner audience. Given that the audience was new to Tommy’s, we knew this would be a marathon, not a sprint, and it was necessary to create space to test, learn and see what worked best. As such, our campaign was inherently integrated across multiple touch points. We pulled away from traditional media to reach partners where they were and opted for a full channel mix, swapping the Guardian for beer mats, BBC Breakfast for Reddit, and a Radio Day for Spotify.

The results

Importantly, the campaign made a real difference – not just a flash in the pan, but foundational work rooted in insight to reach an overlooked audience that really needed help. 35% of men aged 25-48 said they had seen the campaign (the highest of all groups, showing effective targeting), and we generated over 3,000+ visits to the hub, 500K views of video and a 2.7% increase in male visitors to their website.

We’re incredibly proud to have been part of the transformative change that Tommy’s is creating in the space of pregnancy.

Our work with Kroo

The launch of socially conscious digital bank Kroo sparked a badly needed conversation about traditional banks prioritising profits over people by not passing interest rates onto their customers. Data we commissioned showed banks were profiting over £10bn in interest that’s not being passed on to customers.

We partnered with Kroo Bank on their mission to disrupt the banking system and transform customer expectations of what good banking looks like. Our objectives were to build brand awareness, generate new customers and kickstart their mission to be the first bank customers truly love and trust.

The challenge

Our challenge was to raise awareness of an entirely new bank during the cost-of-living crisis in a media landscape dominated by high street names and established neo-banks such as Monzo. We also needed to explain a complex topic that customers have been purposefully kept in the dark about.

Despite low levels of customer satisfaction, consumers have been trained not to expect better – with only one in eight people reporting they had switched bank accounts in the past three years, and over a third of Brits have had the same current account for over 20 years.

We were brought on board in November 2022, just three weeks ahead of their launch and a tough Christmas media landscape to cut through. Despite this, we secured an exclusive interview with The Times with new data exposing households missing out on £5.4bn in interest per year.

The results

In just the first six months, we secured a steady stream of media coverage (114 pieces of media coverage totalling an online circulation of 2,589,166,798), including key publications such as Money Saving Expert, The Times and Evening Standard. We also supported Kroo in writing blogs and social content relating to financial education and improving consumers’ economic literacy.

As well as focusing on the broader banking system, we understood that during a cost-of-living crisis, it was important to demonstrate to consumers exactly what was in it for them. We secured a special feature in the Martin Lewis Show where he branded Kroo bank as “The best open to all easy access savings with unlimited withdrawals since 2012”.

Since starting our work with Kroo, we have helped them attain more than 125,000 new customers, and we continue to work with Kroo on their journey to be the only bank that customers trust and love.