Case studies
How insight enabled a charity to focus social media engagement on connection.
National Trust for Scotland, UK
An independent charity that protects and shares some of Scotland’s most precious historic places and natural landscapes.
Services: Insight for Content Strategy
Tools: User testing, benchmarking, workshops + reports
Delivered: 2020 – 2021
The ask.
The National Trust for Scotland welcomes 3 million visitors annually and, with more than 300k members, is Scotland’s largest membership organisation.
During the pandemic, the Trust pivoted to digital communications and services; they moved quickly but this moment highlighted that they didn’t really know who their online and social media audiences were.
This presented the Trust with a challenge: given the enormous range of their responsibilities, how could they prioritise what content to produce, for whom, and in what formats? How could the use social media to deepen engagement and build support for the organisation?
The answer.
The outcome.
Together, the results helped everyone to understand both the current performance and potential opportunities for using online content to support organisational priorities.
For the team, the key benefits were having a robust and tested audience framework to understand motivations, interests, and behaviours and a way to measure the size of each of these audiences. At the same time, comparing their results with those of other organisations helped them reflect on how they could set themselves apart. This allowed the team to develop an effective strategy, have more productive conversations, and collaborate more effectively with colleagues. The research and shift in strategy has had a long-lasting impact.
The team now has the confidence to create more emotionally engaging content that aligns with the values that the Trust and their audiences share. They are able to take a more proactive approach to commissioning and producing content. The impact has been impressive, delivering a growth in audience reach and far deeper engagement.
–David Fettes, Social Media Manager, National Trust for Scotland
“It has been an absolute joy working with FG+W. Their experience, expertise, and insights are invaluable. Their work on our audience research project has been instrumental in developing a social media strategy for our organisation.
Social media is one of our most important touch points, so having such in-depth data has helped us improve the ways in which we serve our audience on social media and deliver our mission.
It allows us to deepen engagement with our audience, build an emotional connection, and nurture those important relationships, which is key to our future and becoming more financially sustainable.
Since this research, which has completely changed our approach, we’ve seen a noticeable, positive impact against KPIs: reach, engagements, audience growth rate, amplification rate, etc have all increased significantly.”
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