Christchurch BID

Christchurch BID came to us with a summer to sell. Not a product, not an offer, a whole town’s worth of events that needed people to actually turn up to them.

The Ask

The brief was simple to say and hard to pull off. Get locals out of their houses. Get visitors into the town. Get tills ringing on the High Street, the Quay, Castle Street and beyond. And do it by reaching people who weren’t already following Christchurch BID, because the people already in their audience weren’t the ones the summer needed.

Three pieces of work were agreed: a print piece, a bus stop poster, and an organic social campaign, with a small Meta ad budget behind it to help the message travel further.

The Work

The print piece was an A3 sheet folded down to A5, door-dropped through 15,000 homes across Christchurch and the surrounding area. Bold orange sunflowers on a deep teal background, built to survive the bin. It needed to be the kind of thing someone would open, read properly, and then actually keep, not scan and forget.

A matching poster went up on Christchurch High Street’s bus stops, catching people who were already in town and giving them a reason to come back for more than one event.

The social campaign ran through the summer on @ChristchurchBID: carousels and stories, tagging the businesses and partners behind each event, and keeping the comments and conversation warm rather than just broadcasting a calendar of dates. Design work sat with Blue, our in-house designer, who built the sunflower look to work as hard on a phone screen as it did through someone’s letterbox.

The Result

By 17 August, Facebook had carried 1.1 million views for Christchurch BID, up 50.5% on the months before the campaign. 217,700 different people saw that content over the summer, up 27.5%.

Of that 1.1 million, 90% came from organic reach. The ad spend was actually pulled back by 44.8% over the same period, and views still went up. The design and the content were doing the work the ad budget wasn’t being asked to do.

Instagram added another 153,000 views, up 65.7%, almost all of it organic too.

One post did more on its own than most campaigns manage in a month. The Dino Trail post pulled 159,700 views by itself.

And on the part of the brief that mattered most, reaching people who weren’t already following, the account picked up 753 new Facebook followers and 322 new Instagram followers since the campaign began on 1 April. That’s over a thousand people who now hear about Christchurch’s events directly, who didn’t before.

The Feedback

Not every case study comes with a resident writing in unprompted. One did, about the door-dropped poster:

“I am just dropping a note so that you can congratulate your graphic designer for the Summer in Christchurch publicity that was posted through my door. Normally this kind of stuff goes straight in the bin, but the orange sunflower and teal background really jumped out at me. Then I realised it wasn’t just an A5 flyer but a fold out poster with all the details clearly laid out of the summer events in Christchurch. I will keep and refer to it. Well done to the designer.”

That’s the print piece doing exactly what it was built to do: earning a place on someone’s fridge instead of a place in their recycling.

Want a summer like this?

If you run a town centre, a venue, or an event that needs people to actually show up, that’s the kind of work we do. Get in touch at hello@lwhmarketing.com.