Imperial College London
Crafting first-class copy for a world-leading institution
Imperial College London is a science-based university with an international reputation for excellence in teaching and research. Consistently rated amongst the world’s best universities, Imperial is committed to developing the next generation of researchers, scientists and academics through collaboration across disciplines.
Our rapid response and flexibility, combined with excellent copywriting, made us a good choice to fill a gap in the team.
The brief
Imperial College Communications and Public Affairs Office asked Campus PR to provide a copywriting service to help them continue to promote research at Imperial during a period of understaffing in their media team.
Over a 12-month period we were asked to handle stories from many different scientific disciplines to help ensure they reached their full potential in terms of publicity.
Our response
In every case, we evaluated the media potential of the research findings and made a recommendation to the media team about the angle to take and whether the story would work best as a news story on Imperial’s website, or as a full press release.
Typically, this would require reading through an academic paper, before interviewing the authors to gain an in-depth understanding of the research and its implications.
Whether a news story or a press release, the work we produced was a great example of Campus PR’s core copywriting strength: being able to create engaging, easy to understand copy from technically challenging material.
All the stories we worked on for Imperial were aimed at a lay audience, with no assumed level of technical or scientific knowledge.
They were designed to draw in readers from stakeholder groups including funders, research collaborators, potential commercial partners and prospective students.
A key feature of the service we provided for Imperial was the ability to be available at short notice and to produce high quality copy to tight deadlines.
This meant we were able to act as a very flexible and reliable extension to their core team.
The results
Over a 12-month period we produced over 30 news stories for Imperial covering a wide range of subjects from astrophysics to life sciences.
A significant number of these stories achieved national coverage.
We were subsequently recommended by Imperial’s Research Media Relations Manager to provide a similar service for the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), in Heidelberg.