Parks Trust Milton Keynes | Trust Us | TV digital and radio
Multi-channel brand awareness campaign to showcase the outstanding work of The Parks Trust in Milton Keynes
Recently awarded City status, Milton Keynes residents have long valued to huge range of green spaces and parks available to them. In most other cities, these would be maintained by the local council, but MK is unique in that most of the parks, woodlands and green spaces are developed and maintained by an independent charity, the Parks Trust who have been custodians of these critical environments for 30 years.
To raise awareness of the important work the charity does, how its done, why it benefits all residents and to encourage more people to take advantage of their local green spaces, we were commissioned to create a TV ad with a longer web film, and showcase the best and to strongly differentiate themselves from other UK Parks. We were also asked to create a much longer film that deep dives into the Parks Trust's work with stakeholders and partners to create growth and future investment opportunities.
We developed the ‘Trust us’ campaign to compliment their activities across the second half of 2022 as they celebrated their 30-year birthday, with spots for TV, social and radio and creating a library of content assets to support their in-house marketing team.
Parks Trust has over 6,000 acres of beautiful and inspirational green spaces, parks, ancient woodlands, lakes and rivers, as well as over 500 educational and leisure activities. The challenge was how to capture these beautiful environments and the hard work and educational outreach that goes with them and condense this into a punchy local TV campaign to air on SkyAdsmart, ITV Hub and All 4. Accompanying the TVC, we created longer films for their website and social channels, helped with a radio campaign, as well as generating multiple social media cut-downs of 10-15 seconds in different aspect ratios.
The main purpose of the short-form content was to encourage local residents and new customers to visit the parks, but by creating a much bigger library of assets we’ve given them the tools to promote the work the Parks Trust do through investment portfolios, biodiversity and events to constantly generate new revenue which in turn is reinvested by the charity.
Filmed across 3 glorious days in the May sunshine, we worked with two camera crews including a drone set up and Steadicam, to capture the stunning scenery and behind-the-scenes work. We cast families, local residents,, dozens of Parks Trust staff and volunteers and even a few residents of the non-humankind, including konik ponies, cattle, sheep, birds, butterflies and dogs!
With so many activities and locations to shoot and photograph, we had a lengthy and detailed shot list to capture but the atmosphere on set was such fun and the environments so inspiring that the hard work was all worthwhile
One of the biggest challenges was processing so much content and creating selects but once we’d broken the back of it, the editing process became much easier.
We’re delighted to report that in 2022 when the campaign was released, more than 70% of the population of Milton Keynes took part in events and activities in the Parks Trust parks.
2-minute brand film
With so many acres to explore and provide us with thousands of gorgeous shots it was tricky to cut down for the TV and digital campaigns. As an added bonus we were also able to produce a long-form content piece for Parks Trust’s website diving deeper into the huge variety of work they do for their community.
Stakeholder Engagement
The Parks Trust is unique as it is an independent charity. To support the work they do for its residents - humans and wildlife, we produced a stakeholder film, hearing in-depth from key staff members about current projects and ambitions.
This project was a pleasure and a privilege to work on. After winning a competitive pitch which was instigated by our partner production network, Treacle, the three companies combined to collaborate and work through the best way to achieve the desired outcomes at the deliverable budget levels. Communications were excellent throughout and we generated exactly the right amount of content to be able to tell the story and showcase the incredible green spaces of Milton Keynes at their best.
“We found our perfect production partners in Prod. They quickly got to grips with the brief and understood our need to communicate a wide variety of messages to diverse audiences across the city of Milton Keynes. From conception and scripting through to filming and post-production, it was a joy to work with Prod and we’ve made great friends with the team in the process. As a charity, our budgets need to be wisely spent. Prod’s integrated, end-to-end service delivered great value for money“
— Hannah Bodley, Deputy Chief Executive
