The Infrastructure Forum tif Case Study
Challenge:
tif - The Infrastructure Forum, a corporate IT user group, comprising IT professionals from 51% of the top FTSE 100 companies, was finding it increasingly difficult to grow membership further.
In order to expand member numbers, K+R aimed to increase awareness and understanding of tif. and the benefits of membership amongst senior IT managers. This required changing perceptions of the organisation from being an IT technical forum to one that was more business orientated and, therefore, more relevant to the needs of senior IT personnel.
K+R’s challenge was to reach a wider, more business orientated audience and communicate with business and management journalists on national publications. This necessitated moving the organisation away from IT and computing trade press where it had previously been successful.
K+R needed to demonstrate to national journalists that tif. was able to add practical value to corporate IT users and was a strong and effective campaigning body fighting on the side of the IT end user community.
Strategy:
K+R chose to focus on one subject and utilise the vendor independence and combined strength of the tif. membership to campaign on a single issue – Microsoft’s new software licensing policy which members saw as an abuse of its dominant market position.
K+R advised that the story should not focus on the particular ‘gripes’ of the tif. members, but rather on how Microsoft’s actions could negatively impact on British businesses as a whole – especially those on low margins. Concentrating on how this issue is symptomatic of software ‘giants’ becoming unaccountable and ‘out of control’.
tif. needed to demonstrate that this was an issue that affected all UK businesses in order to elevate it from the pages of a trade magazine to a national business title.
Tactics:
K+R advised that tif. should write a letter to Patricia Hewitt MP at the DTI, outlining why tif. members and businesses as a whole were angry about Microsoft’s ‘Windows Tax’ and asking for its help.
K+R sold in a single story as an exclusive to the Sunday Telegraph outlining why tif. would be calling on the UK Government to refer Microsoft to the Office of Fair Trading.
Results:
- Nine new members have joined tif. and K+R’s target has been met.
- 114% jump in visitor numbers to the tif. website from August to September 2001.
- Visitor numbers for September 2001 represented some 20% of the total number for the first nine months of the year. This is almost double the average volume (of 11%).
- 22 pieces of national and international print coverage - including Sunday Telegraph & FT.
- 3 pieces of broadcast coverage – BBC News 24.
- 23 pieces of trade coverage – including Computer Weekly & Computer Business Review.
- 20 interviews for David Roberts with broadcast and print media.
- Coverage in UK national newspapers alone generated 11,486,279 ‘opportunities to see’.
- Total opportunities to see (excluding broadcast) was 22,247,480.
