Recently, a social media-published April Fools’ stunt by client Childcare.co.uk, a platform that allows parents to solve their childcare needs, received unprecedented interest. This led to a great opportunity for a good old fashioned reactive PR campaign…
The idea:
Childcare.co.uk ran an April Fools’ Day story on its social media channels, saying it was offering a service to relieve people of the least fun parenting task – changing dirty and smelly nappies! The service, ‘Nappy 999’, would be an ‘Uber-style peer-to-peer service’ for nappy changing.
Our advice was that this would likely be better for social media, as with our experience, we know that although some wacky, hair-brained ideas can work well on April Fools’ Day, quite often they are just clubbed together in round-up articles and only appreciated by us PRs!
Childcare.co.uk posted the service across its social media channels, on April 1st. The post linked through to a page on its website to outline what the service was and how parents could request ‘Nappy 999’.
Today we are launching the world’s first on-demand Uber-style nappy changing service.
Nappy 999 is a peer-to-peer service for nappy changing!
For more details see https://t.co/jyXV76YTVR pic.twitter.com/PBVoUxixwH
— Childcare.co.uk (@childcare) April 1, 2018
Four days later, because we love a good data report, the client told us that the page featuring its new ‘service’ had more than 400,000 unique visitors!
We have a great relationship with the founder, and the second he mentioned the success of it, I think we both immediately spotted an opportunity for a reactive PR story! By lunchtime that day, we had a release over to Childcare.co.uk officially launching ‘Nappy 999’ as an ACTUAL service, based on the popularity of the initial story, spreading the news far and wide that parents can now actually hire people to change their children at £5 per nappy.
We think this might even be the first time an April Fool’s Day story has become an actual service!
The reactive PR story was a hit with the media.
Results:
Coverage included outlets like The Wright Stuff, The Sun, The Independent, Mail Online and Yahoo.
Parents, would you fancy the idea of a professional nappy-changing service, where a pro comes to your home to do the business after your baby’s done the business, changing their nappy for a fiver? Yes, this service really does exist! What do you make of it though? #wrightstuff pic.twitter.com/eJ4LyRnBPS
— The Wright Stuff (@5WrightStuff) April 23, 2018
According to Coverage Book’s metrics, the coverage had a total online audience of 782.6m, with just shy of 1.3m estimated coverage views.
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