Final Yeah Projects Pt4 // National Gardening Week Campaign

(Warning, this might be quite a long one)!. 

National Gardening Week is an organisation help by the Royal Horticultural Society which happens once a week, every year and aims to get people of all ages and professions involved with gardening and helping out in the community. Despite this being their aim, there is very little advertising and promotion for the cause, meaning that this isn't always met.
As someone who has always had a bit of an interest in gardening and in recent years gardening interiors, I found out the event whilst looking around the web at groups, workshops and organisation aimed at young adults/ adults with this interest. After doing a little research on the RHS and NGW I soon realised that promotion was something they were lacking and thought this would be a great project to just and work on.




This year National Gardening Week was held on the 14th-20th April 2014. A week after the event, I visited some local Sheffield florists to ask them some questions about the event and whether they had done anything to support it. Sadly neither of the businesses knew the event had even happened.
Through this I decided to build a campaign for it and produce some promotion for the 2015 event. Outside/In is targeted at busy city types ranging from graduates to young families and business people.

After visiting the local florists; Plantology and Flora, I set out to produce a range of informative advertising for the campaign. I decided to do this by producing 3 magazines showcasing easy and crafty ways people can bring a bit of the outside, in. Each magazine specifically accommodating to those with a lack of garden space and busy lifestyles to contend with. The inspiration for the content of the magazines came quite easily, having already made a terrarium myself and having an interest in gardening interiors, I thought this would be the perfect solution to the problem. After coming up with the initial idea I went out to the local Botanical Gardens and back to the florists to take some photographs as I wanted to use my own photography throughout. This was because neither the websites of the florist or the NGW website had very good images. I wanted something fresh and new for my project. 

 The logo and background for the campaign promo is a digital collage from the photographs I had taken from the florists and Botanical gardens. I really liked the vibrance of the colours and wanted to make something that was really going to pop and stand out, if people were to see it, rather than just walk past it. I won't go into too much detail about that as it was pretty simple.

After talking to the staff at both florists, they shared a interest in the project and were keen to be apart of it, if said project were to happen. This then inspired the idea to create an event for people to take part in during the gardening week. 

As well as producing the magazines and keeping in mind that my target audience is very social media savvy, I created a blog version of the magazine for those who may not have picked them up and to reach a wider audience. As well as the blog, social media platforms such as twitter, facebook and instgram would be updated and used to create buzz around the campaign and connect with more people and companies. Using things such as hashtags and enabling people to upload and share their creations will hopefully encourage more people to take part as well as further more spread the word.

As well as updating social media platforms, I wanted to expand on their marketing strategy of giving away seeds to the first 10,000 people who registered to the NGW website but setting up competitions on the media platforms such as instagram where peoples creations could win them prizes and also keep momentum throughout the year. I redesigned the seed packets to fit the branding of the campaign and also made sure that the seeds were to plants and herbs which were easy to take care of and accommodate to my target audience.

The final outcomes of the campaign include 3 magazines; Outside/In // Introducing people to National Gardening Week and informing them of the cause. Terrariums // A step by step guide to making your own and Repotting // Crafty ideas and tips for repotting your plants.
A poster of the event which can be applied to any sign post and used in shop windows etc. Redesigned seed packets for the first 10,000 people to register and competition winners. A blog; projectoutsideinngw.blogspot.co.uk and An event held at Plantology Sheffield. (hypothetical) 

Personally I think this was one of my favourite projects in final year to work on, I had a lot interest in the campaign and is something that I'm going to working on further and hopefully submitting as an idea. I was very happy with the outcomes and with the way I worked and spent my time with it. This was also something that ended up in portfolio.