Ideas that work – from home

The legal profession – from barristers to solicitors, paralegals to judges – can seem completely inaccessible, especially if you’re a student from a non-privileged background. State school students are less likely to get the initial teaching, experience, and opportunities to open their eyes to career in Law. That’s where PRIME comes in; an alliance of major UK law firms, offering work experience to students from state school backgrounds.

Working with PRIME, we designed a brand with appeal for students, parents, teachers, and prospective participant law firms – enabling everyone to get involved and get experience. Our brand new website was researched carefully with each group, making sure each audience had exactly what they needed to know. Animations – requested and guided by the students themselves – helped introduce what PRIME is all about (and even explained a little bit about the legal world itself). And our new geometric branding now adds a memorable twist to every PRIME event.

Hogan Lovells are a law firm with a clear message: they are the Global Game-Changers. But what does that actually mean for students? How do we get this message far and wide? These are the questions that shaped our campaign.The key objectives were to:

• Promote the firm’s global reach, career opportunities, and world-renowned clients.
• Boost brand awareness, leaving no doubt in students’ minds that Hogan Lovells are an elite law firm doing high-profile projects all around the world.
• Grow an organic audience for long-term promotion of careers and the overall Hogan Lovells brand.

Enter the Global Game-Changers Challenge: a four-week competition hosted on Hogan Lovells’ graduate Instagram page. We also did organic promotion on Facebook and Twitter, and paid social across Facebook and Instagram – including on the feed and in-story.

Each week for four weeks, we posted a film clip of a Hogan Lovells lawyer asking a question about their world. All the answers can be found on their graduate careers site, which students submitted via Direct Message. The prize? £150 in travel vouchers. We revealed the answer at the end of each week with another film clip, and chose our winners.

Each week had its own theme: international secondments, global interconnectivity, their Global Citizenship Programme, and global clients. All our questions and posts were tied to these themes, so students were getting insights about Hogan Lovells’ world at every turn. In short, we were boosting brand awareness in the very way we designed the competition.

Visually, we used Instagram’s grid feature to do something really distinctive. The grid displays three posts side by side – but we went one step further. We seamlessly knitted together the posts with a striking image of a Hogan Lovells international location, a different one per week.

Metrics and results

Results for in-feed competition content on Instagram only (organic)

• 4,188 views across question and answer videos
• 654 engagements (14% engagement rate) on Instagram feed posts
• 300+ competition entries via Instagram DM from law and non-law students from wide-ranging universities
• 30% increase in Instagram followers

Results for paid promotion – traffic driving to Instagram

• 749 clicks from ads through to Instageam
• 713,561 impressions on promotional posts
• 27,876 engagements on promotional posts

Stafford Long was engaged by DNV GL Energy to develop an internal communications strategy and a programme of change management.

Over a period of a 4-year strategy, the purpose has been to bring inspiration and focused energy to DNV GL’s people – to align with the organisations core values and overall strategic business need. We called this programme ‘Hello Tomorrow’ – a clarion call to embrace the challenges that the future brings and the opportunities that are here today.

We started by gathering, connecting and engaging with a group of 140 up-and-coming employees – our internal influencers. We gave them a comprehensive and varied programme of events, resources, platforms and multimedia to inspire them to lead change.

We then produced a series of comms that reached out the wider organisation through film, interactive training, collaboration & discussion.

Within the ‘Hello Energy’ framework, managers were able to share content and themes with their teams that they learnt through the change events. Exercises and discussion sessions are held via Microsoft Yammer and Teams – facilitated by the Executive Leadership Team.

It’s a well-worn phrase, but with FCDO Services, your global impact is genuine. This in-government team work with friendly governments worldwide to provide secure construction, IT, logistics, and more.

What does that mean? Constructing embassies overseas. Restoring ancient government buildings. Protecting servers that store visa applications. Delivering equipment securely, to governments in isolated, sometimes volatile countries.

With a complex offering and an unusual mix of teams, the organisation struggled to explain themselves so that potential candidates could understand, and see themselves working there.

We needed to capture the reality of these diverse roles – and how they protect people worldwide. Plus, we had to meet some tight restrictions. We couldn’t show real colleagues or real government buildings, because of the secure nature of the organisation’s work.

Enter the Virtual Embassy. Our new tool puts wide-ranging FCDO Services roles in context. Within a fictional embassy, users can explore diverse teams’ day-to-day work and impact – all without giving away the security of existing government buildings or colleagues.

Our 14-room embassy and 100+ hand-drawn furnishings are inspired by real embassy architecture, fictionalised for security purposes. With seven guides to choose from, all 276 hotspots tell detailed stories of real work, based on meetings with 50+ colleagues.

Plus, the Embassy helps the organisation tackle privilege and encourage diversity. Using straightforward language, the embassy is accessible for those without pre-existing public sector knowledge. And, meeting best practice in accessibility, it works for both mobile and desktop users.

Explore for yourself here: https://virtual-embassy.fcdoservicescareers.co.uk/

The results:

• 80+ roles covered
• 50+ colleagues interviewed, from mechanics to architects
• 276 hotspots, signed off and cleared with security
• 30,271 lines of code in 3 languages
• Super-low bounce rate: 38.89%
• Embraced by users, with calls to add it to UK diplomatic training

Stafford Long was engaged by DNV GL Energy to develop an internal communications strategy and a programme of change management. As part of the internal comms activity, one quarter was focused fully on teaching colleagues about “customer centricity”.

So, we created a digital tool. Within the tool, a scenario unfolds. ‘Sørens International’ is a leading portable consumer technology company with lofty ambitions. Expanding on innovations in wireless smart-watch charging, it now wants to bring under-pavement wireless charging infrastructure to its home country: Catalysia.

Who better to use as our customer than the mercurial billionaire, Gustav Sørens?

Users must win over the notoriously difficult-to-impress Sørens by listening to his questions and comments, and offering the best response.

Each option is scored as “bad”, “average” or “excellent”. Only an “excellent” answer progresses you to the next stage, but the scores of your initial answers are recorded, and a different ending is played depending on how customer centric you really were.

Newton’s not your usual business consultancy. Their model is purposefully disruptive; their culture vibrant, individual and nearing cult-status.

They look for unusual experienced hires too: strong personalities, but team players – intellectually sharp, incredibly experienced, but importantly – fun to be around.

Our call to them?

You’re surrounded by people who pursue brave ideas. There are no unwieldy processes. And no one ever utters ‘that’s not my job’. You’re encouraged to ask tough questions. To be a bit left field. Meet the Newton You.

Our monthly social strategy, our experienced hire brochure, and our series of videos would help Newton find exactly the consultants they needed. Plus, we’d enable the new consultants to find their ideal work environment, and become exactly who they want to be.

FCDO Services were relatively unknown as an employer. More than a few people confused them with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Clearly, they needed to get their message out there. But first, we needed to know what that message should be.

We started with thorough research. We spoke to FCDO Services’ people right across the business, to find out exactly what they felt about the culture, benefits and challenges. We did surveys externally too, to capture perceptions, misconceptions – and what (if anything) people really knew about FCDO Services.

What we discovered was something amazing: that, with FCDO Services, your global impact is genuine, and the pride is real. This in-government team work with friendly governments worldwide to provide secure construction, IT, logistics, and more.

What does that mean? Constructing embassies overseas. Restoring ancient government buildings. Protecting servers that store visa applications. Delivering equipment securely, to governments in isolated, sometimes volatile countries.

They even provide emergency response – from repairing embassies damaged by hurricanes in the Caribbean, to providing IT when a heatwave melted government laptops in Sierra Leone.

Ultimately though, the skills FCDO Services need are the same you’d look for anywhere. HR professionals and HGV drivers. Finance experts and IT specialists. The different here? You’re making a tangible impact on the world, protecting people, assets and information everywhere. In short?

It’s your job, bigger.

Our core message, based on months of research is backed by eight pillars, making the EVP flexible for different markets, from apprentices to experienced hires; project managers in Milton Keynes to engineers working overseas.

Resonating across the organisation, employees have taken it to heart. And to help with adoption, we’ve rolled it out far and wide, from the careers website to the organisation’s digital onboarding tool; from national apprenticeship campaigns to day-to-day job listings, to our brand new Virtual Embassy.