Wren Hall Projecting Intergenerational Care

Wren Hall is a care home that sits adjacent to a nursery for pre-school children. Called Little Wrens, the two together form a wider ‘Wren’ care community.

Rated outstanding by the CQC, our primary objective was to enhance the profile of Wren Hall to increase awareness of its care facilities at a local level and drive care enquiries, while underlining its outstanding approach. A secondary objective was to raise its profile within the care sector, helping to position it as a care provider with a positive, rewarding, working environment to encourage recruitment. A tertiary objective was to improve awareness of Little Wrens’ nursery provision at a local level, too.

Whilst our remit primarily covered general care home news and developments, we recognised Wren Hall’s proximity and close relationship with Little Wrens presented a wealth of opportunities to promote authentic intergenerational initiatives to help showcase the quality of care across both settings.

We also realised its intergenerational offering sets it apart from its competitors, so we knew that was the angle that would help Wren stand out the most. This saw us create a series of intergenerational activities involving residents and nursery children over a six-month campaign. With the nursery children visiting the home’s residents practically every day, there were authentic relationships already in place we could look to build upon in a bid to promote both settings – serving to maximise the impact of our outputs.

Looking to use a variety of initiatives to promote the care community’s intergenerational offering, our focus was PR, but we also provided supporting digital content including video, photography, copy and design.

Finding an appropriate news hook for our PR activity was essential for it to work effectively. And, whilst we had authentic relationships in the home, we needed an ‘excuse’ to share them. This saw us look at forthcoming events in the calendar to see if anything stood out as an appropriate news hook for our activity.

The first intergenerational opportunity that caught our eye centred on World Emoji Day in July. With emojis a modern phenomenon, youngsters would just be coming to grips with them, while older adults living in care would likely only have a rudimentary knowledge – and we recognised the potential engagement opportunity offered by the juxtaposition of old and young.

The next intergenerational opportunity was ‘Kids Take over the Kitchen Day’ in September, where we looked to have children cook for residents. This was followed with Halloween trick or treating in October and, finally, World Nursery Rhyme Week in November.

For World Emoji Day, our video team went to the home ahead of the day and organised a simple initiative that saw residents and children look at pictures of emojis, before attempting to imitate them. This created heart-warming visual content, which we turned into press materials to share with a mix of local and care trade press, while it also provided great social media content.

Kids Take Over the Kitchen Day involved inviting nursery children to the home to work with the chef to provide a meal of their choice for residents. With the children settling on pizza, our video team filmed them at work.

Moving onto Halloween, we invited the children to come and ‘trick or treat’ at Wren Hall. Turning the output into a press release, we shared it with the home’s relevant media.

Finally, with World Nursery Rhyme Week falling in November, we asked residents, children and carers to work together to create their own nursery rhyme, looking at the relationship between the two care settings. Peter, one of the residents, then recited the poem to the children – and we filmed the interaction and reactions to capture some lovely feel-good content.

All of the above was supplemented by additional PR activity, such as writing feature articles for the care press on Wren Hall’s behalf, as well as sharing relevant home news about award wins, events and more.

We secured more than 70 pieces of press coverage, with the home appearing in the news agenda consistently across core local and care trade press. This was supplemented by record social media engagement for the home over the course of our six-month comms plan.

Each individual activity delivered results.

The Emoji Day activity was the home’s most engaged with social content ever up until that point, generating 1.5k impressions on Facebook, while it also featured in the Mansfield Chad and Ashfield Chad – the home’s primary media outlets, as well as the Eastwood and Kimberley Advertiser in print, and  

The engagement generated on Emoji Day was subsequently surpassed by video content created for Kids Take Over the Kitchen Day. Again, generating local and care trade coverage in the media it was also covered by Yahoo! News. The home’s key social channel, Facebook, saw more than 2.2k impressions.

Halloween trick or treating secured local and care trade press PR coverage, with Facebook seeing 1.4k impressions. World Nursery Rhyme Day ticked the same boxes – generating social engagement (1.4k Facebook impressions), local press coverage and care trade coverage.

The social engagement across these activities was entirely organic, with no paid or promoted posts, meaning more than 6.5k impressions were generated amongst the home’s prime local audience by creating naturally engaging content.

Our consistent social media activity generated more than 274.5K impressions over six months, with a 67% growth rate across that period. Average post engagement also grew 59% during that time, with reach up 38% and follower count increasing by 11%.

With a new website only going live recently, website traffic stats aren't available, but our work provided engaging content with which to populate it, serving to show off the culture of care across both settings, and convincing prospective residents and families that Wren Hall truly offers outstanding care.

This campaign won Best Marketing, Advertising or PR campaign in the care sector's national Care Home Awards, as well as being shortlisted in the regional PRCA Dare Awards for the South West.