The challenge

Leading up to the Canadian Federal Government’s application deadline for innovation funding, the BC Tech Association – in collaboration with UBC, Wavefront, the Innovation Network and Research Universities’ Council of BC – had engaged Deloitte to develop a white paper on BC’s potential to become a globally recognized technology supercluster. When Bill Tam of BC Tech reached out to Switchboard, the white paper’s completion was incomplete and BC Tech’s prearranged national print exclusive shifted away from their desired messaging and towards a broader story. Further, BC Tech’s counterpart in the Toronto-Waterloo corridor had a head start on self-promotion, releasing a McKinsey report and securing coverage in the Globe six months earlier. The release date was imminent and BC Tech was anxious for mainstream coverage.

The solution

Working on an extremely tight timeline, Switchboard developed a social media strategy to be implemented by the project team. The proposed final version of the report arrived just hours before it was set to be released – in a format that Switchboard knew would be too granular for mainstream media. So Switchboard created a high-level one-pager summarizing the report’s findings, which would be more digestible for reporters, as well as overhauling the original press release, which had been written internally. Finally, Switchboard reached out to a number of local, regional and national reporters with a comprehensive media kit that included the press release, full report and media one-pager. Finally, our media relations team facilitated follow-ups and interviews.

The results

In addition to building a number of new relationships between reporters and BC Tech, the Digital Technology Supercluster Report was featured in Business in Vancouver, Daily Hive, BetaKit, Business Examiner and BC Business. Switchboard also facilitated an interview of Bill Tam on BNN. Overall, the campaign had an estimated reach of nearly 1.9 million views (not including the BNN television coverage), earned without use of sponsored content. Influencers within the technology space promoted the report and its coverage, further extending the reach of the campaign. The advertorial equivalency value was more than double the price of the media relations project as a whole. Despite the fact that Switchboard had less than five days to promote the report’s release, the volume of earned coverage greatly outweighed that of BC Tech’s funding competitors in the Toronto-Waterloo Corridor.