Genesis has a leading role to play in the country’s transition to a low carbon future. It has committed to reducing carbon emissions by 1.2 million tonnes by 2025 and reducing emissions from generation by 36%.
As part of this, Genesis wanted to contribute to the national discussion as the country plots its path to being carbon zero. Chris Mirams came to Big On Writing to work alongside their small comms team to develop a Climate Change Energy Hub that would report on, share information and provides comment on the role energy has to play in the transition.
This would be done across three pillars – Your Country, Your Business and Yourself. The target audience was business owners and leaders, sustainability-minded NZers, government officials, employees, business partners and industry stakeholders.
Climate change is a wide-ranging subject awash with commentary. The challenge was to be very disciplined in our stories to develop an energy niche. This required using BOW journalists that had a specific understanding of energy and sustainability. We also wanted a global conversation, so we pulled in contributors from the UK.
The first stage was to develop a Content Strategy and very tight Style Guidelines to ensure the writing followed the niche. The Content Strategy defined the overall editorial mission statement, the three pillars, SEO analysis , audience profiling, mandatories, channels and a vision for what the hub wanted to achieve.
From this we created very tight guidelines to brief around 10 energy writers across the globe. The guidelines took their inspiration from the Genesis brand guidelines, but specifically created journalistic guardrails, covering everything from the thought-leadership tone of the articles, to a tight definition of what stories fitted within the niche of 'Climate change in the energy sector' to incorporating local content, types of photos and more.
Big On Writing then worked closely with the Genesis team to launch a foundation of of 20 articles under three pillars: Your country, Your Business and Yourself. For the next 18 months (to date) we have regularly contributed up to 4 stories per month, over 70 in total, powered with SEO and analytics, for this specialist topic.
Every good writer also thinks visually, so we hunted down photos, links, and even shot videos and suggested graphic ideas to keep readers engaged.
Here are some story examples:
What is the most sustainable car?
Key things to know about home solar battery storage
5 quick ways to reduce your carbon footprint
Peer-to-peer power: the future of sustainable household energy
How to choose energy efficient appliances
From launch to date, the hub was getting an average of 50% open rate, and 36% click through, well above the norm. The top performing article had an average 26-minute read and the hub has already garnered 1,500 subscribers to the newsletter - all resulting in a Hub that made 56% of customers feel more positive about Genesis.
This wasn't our first hub built with Chris Mirams. In 2017, we worked with him to set up the Westpac RedNews Financial Content Hub which is still going strong after eight years. And if you are interested in hubs, here are a few more of our case stories to check out from ERANZ Powering Change to Fonterra’s Dairy Nutrition Hub, as well as Westpac Business Base and Westpac Australia, where our content helped drive a 60% uplift in organic traffic.
There are only solutions with Big on Writing. The team brings high energy, thinks outside the square and always has the client’s objectives top of mind. Whatever the task and goal they will deliver. They have a great network of communications professionals and your project will be better off for having involved BOW.”
Chris Mirams - Group Manager, Media and Coms | Genesis
BOW were terrific at contributing sustainable ideas, organising regular WIPs, and delivering quality articles to brief and on time. We could assign stories and trust them to get on with it, which took a big load off our shoulders. The stories were extremely well-read, a reflection of the journalistic quality we required. We would recommend BOW to anyone looking for the creation of quality sustainable content.
Estelle Sarney, External Communications Manager | Genesis
