Another week, another chance to hit the road to share some learnings both internally and externally. For the former I've been playing my part in the annual Kier Employee Roadshows. These took place over 9 days at the beginning of the month with 21 events organised in 16 locations across the UK. During this time, over 3,000 Kier people attended to hear about the latest financial results and to take part in discussions around the theme of innovation.

Last year I had the perfect excuse to not help out given I was on paternity leave. This meant it was time to pull my weight by attending the inaugural Roadshow in Liverpool followed by another in Sheffield. 

The bulk of the planning for these is expertly managed by our Internal Communications team. It is then up to us to ensure everything runs smoothly on the day and to liaise with the hotels, couriers and AV technicians. I am pleased to say that my shared duties of setting up the room, hosting the Q&A and MC'ing the event all went well. This all contributed to a success for what was a massive undertaking for all involved.

Then last Monday, I headed into London to present as 'The Construction Blogger' to over 100 CIM members and students. This event took place at the Saint Gobain Multi-Comfort Centre which was conveniently only 3mins walk from our London Office. It was organised by Chris Ashworth of Competitive Advantage who was presenting their latest research on the use of Construction Media. I was pleased to write an article for the social media section of this which will be shared as a guest blog post at as later date. Su Butcher, director of 'Just Practising' communication consultancy was to be the chair and we also had case studies from Will Scott of LinkedIn and Anna Hern of Ridgemount PR.

I had previously conversed with all of these people via social media so it was great to meet them in person. It's a good job we all have up to date social media profile pictures! Some key takeaways from the other presentations for me were:
Ready to go!
  • People don't want to hear from the company on LinkedIn - they want to hear from your employees
  • LinkedIn blog posts are most effective at weekends
  • LinkedIn video is definitely worth trying
  • Facebook is not free - it’s algorithm requires you to pay to get traction (unless you’re a celebrity!) 
I was pleased that Su Butcher, in particular, set up my presentation so well in that we both echoed each other's points. This contributed towards making the whole event look perfectly planned and aligned! I have never presented specifically on blogging before but the feedback was excellent, as were the questions. You can view my full presentation below:


One thing that struck me is that some of the attendees asked for magic solutions for the right length of video or exact time to post content to gain traction. If only it was that easy! For me this depends so much on the message, your audience, the medium and your brand. Whilst you may get a head start from the learnings of others the only way to accurately gather this intel is to start posting and analysing yourself. In time you'll know exactly the right messages, timings and creative executions which work.

It was a great event and should hopefully be the first of many given that it was oversubscribed and the positive feedback.

Of course, no recent blog post would be complete without a mention of our campaign 'Shaping Your World'. The aforementioned CIM Construction Group are responsible for running the annual Construction Marketing Awards in London. Each year I've been working in this industry we've been shortlisted for these but are yet to win the big prize.

For the third year running we'll be there but this time in the 'Best Contractor Marketing Campaign' category. These awards are due to take place on 30th November and I put nearly as much effort into the submission as I did the campaign creative!

Roll on 30th November. I'll be the one biting his nails and rocking back and forth in the corner as our category is announced...!
For my final post in this trilogy of focusing on our new campaign I'm going to look at another industry-wide issue which we sought to address. Working in the built environment there are many misconceptions of the sector among students, parents, teachers and careers advisors. These range from it being poorly paid, just consisting of manual work or that it is male dominated.

To prove these stereotypes exist we surveyed 2,000 parents, teachers and careers advisors at secondary schools and academies in the UK state sector. This was published in a report alongside one-to-one interviews with careers advisors and education professionals across the UK. This highlighted the key issues (listed above) which 'Shaping Your World' was devised to address.

For launch, we wanted to set out these issues in a way which would be picked up by the media from broadcast and national to regional and trade. Due to us having a clear solution to a well known industry issue our PR team manged to get some great high profile coverage. This ranged from an 8 minute interview on Radio 4 Today programme to quote of the day in the Independents ‘I’ newspaper.

Securing the support of the Institute of Directors (IoD) and the Government backed Careers & Enterprise Company (C&EC), we then created our 1% pledge. This allows us to measure the impact of 200+ colleagues working with schools and colleges across the UK, engaging with at least 10,000 pupils in the next 12 months. I've signed up myself so will be going back to my roots (I worked in a secondary school for 5 years many moons ago!)

Our people will share their pride and passion and help students better understand the breadth of roles available across the built environment. While this activity was already taking place in pockets around the business, the pledge and universal training ensures that we all sell the full spectrum of the built environment. One of my responsibilities was the build of an internal microsite to communicate this and to act as a repository for the training materials. On here colleagues can also order our ‘Awesome Career in the Built Environment’ a new printed booklet to hand out at school visits that contains key facts about the industry, including real life examples of people doing their jobs and routes into the industry.

Before and during launch we delivered a full social media strategy via our organic channels. This encouraged engagement with the campaign and supported outreach by providing useful content on the use of the Virtual World Plaque technologies and encouraged conversations with schools to support our outreach targets. We also asked Kier colleagues to change their social media profile picture to their Avatar for the first week of launch to generate viral recognition.

I was complimented at least twice on my attire.
Clearly a waistcoat is a good look for me!
To launch the campaign externally we held two large public events on Saturday 2nd September; at the Arndale Centre, Manchester and Westfield Shepherd’s Bush. I was at the former and used the opportunity to join other colleagues in dressing up as Brunel! We used digital kiosks to attract people to make their own avatar, take photos with our Instagram/Snapchat boards or take away our careers booklet. This was one of my favourite parts seeing all the team's hard work be so well received.

This campaign has been an enormous labour of love for all involved. I have worked flat out on it for months, alongside the whole team, to show our commitment as an innovator in a sector that is often quite conservative. It has already sparked conversations and invitations to present to our peer community of contractors who have been crying out for new pride and passion collateral and an Ambassador toolkit. I love a good presentation!

The complexity of this campaign is impossible to do justice to in three short posts. We still have lots to add and develop over the 18-24 months we intend it to run. No doubt I'll be mentioning it again at some point as it really has been all encompassing...!
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