Aston University - Knowledge Transfer Partnerships
Highlighting the value and impact of business partnerships
Aston University is a sector-leading provider of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs), which enable UK businesses to improve their competitiveness and productivity through access to academic research and expertise. Aston University is ranked first for the quality of its KTP projects and second for the volume of active projects in its portfolio.
The brief
Aston University is keen to showcase the wide variety of KTPs established with local and national businesses, but has limited in-house capacity to develop content on the large number of projects underway and in the pipeline.
The Research and Knowledge Exchange department’s marketing team needed specialist communications support to develop engaging case studies on the projects, and turn these into press releases for local and specialist media.
Our response
We worked with the team to develop a clear brief for the case studies, ensuring that the University’s key messages were weaved into a narrative that also communicated the value of KTPs clearly to potential business partners.
Templates were created to streamline the process of turning case studies into press releases – each of which require a very different writing style and structure.
We interviewed representatives from both the company involved, the academic team at Aston and, where appointed, the KTP associate for the project. We drew the interviews together with desk research to create a case study and press release for each project, which was then approved by the University’s RKE marketing team and all interviewees.
Where possible, we also sourced images to use alongside the case study.
The results
We now provide a steady stream of content on Aston University’s KTPs.
The in-house teams deploy this content across the University’s website and social media channels, and use our press releases to gain news coverage in local and specialist media.
For example, a recent press release on the University’s KTP with Midlands-based technology company Intercity, which we created to time with Birmingham Tech Week, gained targeted coverage in UK Tech News, Business in the Midlands and Insurance Edge.