PHPR collect VIBES awards 2009 certificate at Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh

Being good PR people, we spun our VIBES news round our contacts and have ended up seven positive results: several of which are really promising meeting requests.

There is also another agency wanting to know how to get the VIBES, so we've pointed them to the VIBES site where it's easy to download the entry forms and all the practical notes on the different award categories: http://www.vibes.org.uk/enter.htm

Plus Margot Grantham, the Scottish director of the excellent Athena network for women sent me a flyer with useful info regarding free recession-busting workshops in Edinburgh for small businesses run by the Business Environment Partnership alongside the City of Edinburgh Council. We are more than happy to pass this info on. The leaflet says:

As part of their Economic Resilience Action Plan the City of Edinburgh Council are working with the Business Environment Partnership to run a series of free workshops at the City of Edinburgh Council Chambers. Upcoming workshops are designed to give practical ideas to cut utility bill costs and understand current & future environmental legislation that may have a financial impact on your business.

Demystifying environmental legislation. What SME’s need to know to ensure compliance – 26th January 2010

Understand your utility bills to cut costs – 25th February 2010

They point out that a 20% cut in energy costs represents the same bottom line benefit as a 5% increase in sales....

The ‘One-Stop-Shop’ provides free tailored advice to any Edinburgh-based company from a microsized start-up to a larger SME. Advice ranges from Government funded grants & loans, resource efficiency, green marketing opportunities to legislation with the aim of identifying cost saving or new sales opportunities for businesses.

Find out more about the workshops or their free advisory service at http://www.thebep.org.uk/ The lady dealing with registrations is called Amy.

Is PHPR Scotland's Greenest PR Agency?

PHPR is delighted that we received a VIBES Scotland shortlisted certificate at the awards ceremony held in the Scottish Parliament last night. VIBES are Scotland's top environmental awards for business. http://www.vibes.org.uk/

We had a serious new business enquiry just after the awards ceremony and we will be fixing up an initial meeting later on today: positive proof that VIBES awards are good for business.

The significance of getting this far in the VIBES awards was really brought home when David Sigsworth, chairman of SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection Agency) said, "The companies on the VIBES shortlist & the winners are recognised by multiple agencies and the Scottish Government for exceptional environmental performance."

PHPR was shortlisted for the best management award for small businesses (less than 50 employees). We are a very small business, and PR doesn't use lots of materials to manufacture things, so the savings we can make through environmental measures are quite small. But they do add up. We have been reducing, re-using and re-cycling since 1986. Each year we add to the eco measures we undertake and most of them benefit our bottom line. And we do help to spread the word and encourage other companies to gain the business benefits of implementing practical environmental measures.

We think we may be the first Scottish PR agency to get this far in the VIBES awards. Until we find out whether any other PR company has been recognised by VIBES for exceptional environmental performance in the last 10 years, we certainly can claim to be one of the greenest PR agencies in Scotland - and that's official!

We worked hard for that recognition. The VIBES awards are tough. Even after attending a half day course on building the business case for a VIBES award, we found the application process was very demanding. It took ages to pull together all the information and do the calculations to prove the savings we achieve. But at each stage we found out more about implementing green measures in business, and demonstrating the savings. And going through that process sparked off ideas for other measures we could try. Our first entry last year gave us really useful feedback from the expert judges - advice that we worked hard to implement before we entered VIBES this year. Yes, we did indeed put ourselves through the VIBES application process twice to get to this stage!

PHPR was one of nine Edinburgh businesses shortlisted:

• Aquamarine Power


• Balfour Beatty Rail


• Edinburgh Napier University


• Maximillion


• PHPR Ltd


• Prestonfield Hotel


• Rabbies Trail Burners


• Wilderness Scotland


• William Waugh
  

VIBES is a partnership between: Scottish Environment Protection Agency, Scottish Government, Scottish Enterprise, Environmental Protection UK, Envirowise and NetRegs.
With support from Business Environment Partnership, CBI Scotland, Energy Saving Trust, Federation of Small Businesses Scotland and Forward Scotland.

Brochures - do you need them?

This is the third in a series of posts re-visiting the 30 low cost or free publicity techniques featured in PHPR's founder's best-selling book: DIYPR, the small business owner's guide to 'free' publicity. The 30 techniques are a mix of sales, marketing and PR tools because you need to work all three disciplines to effectively boost a business. As the series develops, choose a few to trial for a few months. The aim is to work up to 10 varied publicity techniques that work for you and your business to create a rolling PR Plan for success.

Your feedback is most welcome and may be included (with proper attribution) in the forthcoming revised edition of DIY PR.

Despite the flexibility and immediacy of websites and PDF files, there comes a time when many a business owner wonders if it's about time they produced a brochure, or some other sort of impressive printed output, to make the enterprise appear more established. The thought usually hits them when they have just seen a competitors' particularly impressive publication.

There's no doubt that a beautifully printed job is an impressive object, especially if is exquisitely designed and produced on heavy duty coated paper, with a cover finished with a seductively silky surface coating, possibly highlighted with gloss spot varnish.

However, no matter how impressive, you need to think long and hard about your intended recipients. The chances are that your top potential clients are trying to run a paperless office and your work of art will go straight into the bin. Or worse: they will take one look and wonder how much of their fees are going towards fancy brochures. Or be shocked at how little care you are displaying for the environment.

There are practical issues. You often need to specify a lot of brochures before the unit cost comes down, but printed materials go out of date so quickly: sometimes before they come back from the printer.

Are brochures just expensive sops to the business owner's ego? Surely luxury brands are an exception?

I would suggest that nowdays, there are cleverer ways for luxury brands to spend their promotional budget. Especially when posh brochures risk trashing the company's environmental credentials. Maybe a bigger spend on design, branding or packaging? An interactive website? Or a really amazing and memorable business card? I don't think people see a business card as a massive waste of resources and the humble card is often the most immediate and frequently used tool.

If you really feel you must leave something decent sitting on prospective clients' desks, consider a good looking pre-printed folder to take well-designed loose-leaf inserts that you can update and run off onto good quality paper. Then you can select a range of product or service information sheets plus relevant case studies and licensed media coverage reprints to impress that particular client. Effectively, every folder becomes a bespoke brochure, with minimal waste. If you use sustainable paper and inks then the environmental impact is reduced and you can add a claim to that effect to collect a small green plus point.

To print or not to print is a good example of 'big picture' PR thinking designed to keep an eye out for all the behaviors and decisions that can impact on a company's reputation.

PHPR short-listed for a VIBES award

Awards are great for business. Many are free to enter and you get to call your business an award-winning enterprise for evermore. Entering is time-consuming, but the best offer expert judges' feedback, so that every entrant benefits.

We have won awards in the past, but I am particularly pleased to hear that PHPR is on the shortlist for the top Scottish environmental awards for business - VIBES. Are we the first Scottish PR agency to be shortlisted?

The VIBES application form process is designed to create a robust environmental policy, so being short-listed is really encouraging as we now know that we are on the right track.

Taking care of our environment is not just a PR exercise for us. We have reduced, re-used and recycled since 1986, so we must have spared a few trees by now. But we were short on measuring and documenting our evidence, as we found out by entering VIBES last year.

Like all the best awards, VIBES (it stands for Vision in Business for the Environment of Scotland) gives expert judge's feedback to every entrant. The idea of entering last year was to use the feedback to do better this year. It has worked.

The main focus is on providing supporting evidence and we addressed some of that in the application. We will be visited at our Edinburgh base and judged in September.

Fingers and toes crossed!