Productivity Programme - Shooting Star

Providing grant funding and support for businesses in Lincoln

Overview

The Productivity Programme for Greater Lincolnshire was led by the University of Lincoln and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). It was designed to offer micro, small, and medium businesses in Greater Lincolnshire various strands of business support, including proof of concept grants, productivity vouchers, graduate internships, business advice, a growth graduate enterprise programme and events.

The Productivity Programme was designed to enable small and medium enterprises to advance and develop their ambitions – driving levels of productivity and investment as well as collaborative engagement leading to new products, processes and services, and creating exploiting new markets with the academic capacity of the University.

The Productivity Programme has now ended but businesses can still receive funding and support from Lincoln Be Smarter.

Objectives

The three main objectives for the Productivity Programme:

Driving productivity for small and medium enterprises (SME’s) in Greater Lincolnshire.

Building awareness of the Productivity Programme to its ideal target audience.

Promoting key programmes and events.

Approach

We worked as the retained PR and marketing agency for the programme from 2018 to 2022 and supported its evolution from the Innovation Programme to the Productivity Programme.

We provided a proactive communications service including press releases, digital marketing, social media management, content creation (including live streaming), website management (uploading event listings, blog posts and case studies), event planning and event support.

Results

The Doing it Differently (DiD) conference in July 2022 attracted over 100 delegates (full capacity). In addition to the main face-to-face event it was also live streamed to avoid disappointment.
Growth in engagement rate and engaged time on website which can be attributed to quality content.
Q1 of 2021 had an engagement rate of 28.3% (21 seconds), whereas by the end of the fourth quarter in 2022 we saw a jump to 43.36% (53 seconds).
Built social media following across LinkedIn and Twitter.
Followers increased for both LinkedIn and Twitter. LinkedIn ended 2019 with 139 followers, and ended 2022 with 385 followers. Twitter’s follower count increased by 145, from 592 at the end of 2019, to 737 at the end of 2022.
Social engagement rates are consistently above 2% for Linked in and above 1.5% for Twitter, so well above industry averages.

Find out how we can drive results for your business