Firefly helps to establish new bower cancer charity, Red Trouser Day, driving presence across search and media

Insight

Each year, Firefly chooses a pro bono cause to support and promote, using its teams to help boost awareness of a worthy organisation. Former bowel cancer sufferer Paul Finch launched Red Trouser Day in 2016 but was in the process of formalising its status as a registered charity, and simultaneously wanted to push the cause into the national awareness. He enlisted Firefly’s help.

Plan

Firefly planned out a series of three workshops, helping Paul to establish the vision, mission and key messaging for the brand. These workshops would also help to establish Paul’s personal media strategy and how he would be profiled across traditional and social media channels, as well as how the brand would differentiate itself from other – more established – bowel cancer charities such as Bowel Cancer UK.

Deliver

Firefly ran the workshops over a month, giving participants time to digest and process the information. The team worked with Paul to understand his personal journey and reasons for setting up Red Trouser Day, his vision for the future of the organisation, how he intended to run ‘Red Trouser Day’ itself each October and the values of the organisation itself. 

The output from these sessions were written messaging, vision and mission documents that summarised the discussions in the workshops. Paul decided to focus on building a close community of supporters, giving the day a more supportive and family-oriented feel, using this as a USP for the brand. 

Evaluate

The workshops set the foundation for how Paul and his communications team ran and talked about Red Trouser Day for the following year. The Firefly team used the output of the sessions to run a media relations and SEO campaign, helping the charity stand out from the crowd.  The campaign gained 102m impressions nationally and internationally and in search, 19/20 results on the first two pages of a Google web search for ‘Red Trouser Day’ related to the cause. 

Paul and his team appeared in Daily Express, The Sun and the Daily Mirror, as well as business titles HR Director and Real Business, helping to secure corporate ambassadors for the day. To date, Red Trouser Day has raised over £146,000, the majority of which is donated to the Royal Marsden Hospital.